AI Valley
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The AI Fear

The AI Fear

PLUS: OpenAI isn’t going public this year

Barsee
14 Sep

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Together with

howdy, it’s Barsee again.

happy monday, AI family, and welcome back to AI Valley.

here are the biggest things worth knowing today:

AI leaders are actually asking to slow AI down
OpenAI isn’t going public this year
Plus trending AI tools, posts, and resources

Let’s dive into the Valley of AI…

ADOBE

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THROUGH THE VALLEY

Courtesy: Ox45

1/ AI leaders are actually asking to slow AI down - Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote a 3,800-word essay arguing that AI capabilities are moving too fast for safety work to keep up. Sam Altman, Elon Musk and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis basically agree.

Amodei wants frontier labs to slow down, let outsiders test their models and eventually get countries to agree on some shared safety rules. His big worry is recursive self-improvement: AI getting good enough at AI research that it starts making better AI itself. He thinks we could be 6-12 months away from swarms of agents doing basically everything humans do on the internet.

The problem is nobody wants to be the first one to slow down. Trump rejected calls for an AI slowdown. His argument is pretty simple: “whoever wins AI wins.”

And China said no too. The state-run Global Times accused the US of trying to limit China’s AI progress through “technological barriers and regulatory monopolies,” calling the proposal a “silent AI Cold War.”

Funny enough, AI 2027 basically predicted this exact situation. In its scenario, experts start freaking out after the leading US lab develops a superhuman AI coder/researcher, but the president refuses to slow down because China might take the lead. We’re obviously not at the superhuman AI researcher bit yet... but the political argument is already here.

There are a couple other explanations for why the labs suddenly want to slow down. Maybe they’re worried about open-weight models catching up. Or maybe they’re all hitting the same walls and seeing something similar internally.

I’m not convinced they’re secretly staring at ASI though. If they were genuinely sitting on intelligence that could run circles around humanity, you’d expect to see some pretty ridiculous breakthroughs outside of chatbots too.

2/ OpenAI isn’t going public this year - despite confidentially filing for an IPO, Sam Altman says 2026 would be an “ill-advised” time to actually do it. OpenAI had reportedly been aiming for Q3/Q4 this year, but Altman now says “we’ve got a lot of stuff to do.”

Part of it is AI safety. Altman says OpenAI doesn’t want the pressure of being public while everything around the technology is moving this quickly, and that it’ll IPO when the business and “society” are ready.

There’s also the less philosophical bit: tech stocks have been volatile and OpenAI has its own financial challenges. The company is reportedly leaning toward 2027 instead.

So the OpenAI IPO is still coming... just probably not this year. (watch Altman’s full interview here)

PRESENTED BY ATLASSIAN

Connect. Learn. Lead. Atlassian State of AI SDLC Digital Summit, September 22

Courtesy: Atlassian

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TRENDING TOOLS

The Hugging bay - the Pirate bay for open LLM's, model weights downloadable with torrents
GPT-Live-1 - a full-duplex voice model that listens and speaks at once and hands hard reasoning to a backend model like Astra
ChatGPT Pets - it helps you keep track of your chats while you’re away from the desktop app

WHAT I'M CONSUMING

Why AI will save the world by Marc Andreessen
We must pace the frontier by Dario Amodei
Mark Zuckerberg: A journey to the heart of history’s largest nonterritorial empire
How AI runs the company | “Our engineers stopped coding a year ago”
Sam Altman confirms OpenAI won’t go public this year