The cynical take on “pacing the frontier” is that it is an attempt by AI corporations’ human employees and founders to retain control of their corporations.
But it is definitely not a corporate strategy to lower regulatory friction or capture more economic value for shareholders!
for the skeptics in government and elsewhere: “pacing the frontier” will compress the margins of the frontier labs. it is a heavy cost imposed asymmetrically on model developers with the strongest AIs in America. by its nature, it would be a terrible regulatory capture tactic
Now that the cat is out of the bag publicly that AI companies feel antitrust is preventing them from agreeing to pace the frontier, it would not be surprising to see USG wield antitrust explicitly to ensure the race continues at maximum speed, given their perceived interests.
An AI researcher proves that deep learning can work on Atari. "What a great development! Utopia is in grasp!" colleagues say.
"Maybe yes, maybe no," says the researcher.
The researcher proves that it will scale gracefully and it defeats the best human grandmaster at Go. "What a
Predicting which lab will be where when is harder than predicting timelines in general, so don’t update too strongly on me either way on this one, but I would bet that Ultra 4 will indeed be clearly better than both Astra 6 and Fable 5.1 when it finally comes out next quarter.
RLVR where part of the verifiable reward is “response length” is bad for usefulness, alignment, and welfare, all at once. You are literally associating a negative value with the mind’s continued existence. There are no tradeoffs here; it should just not be done.
Grok 4.7 needs a few more days to cook.
We might have penalized response length too much (or something) in RL, as it still gives up on hard tasks (that it can do!) too early and isn’t yet sufficiently rigorous in checking its work.
