Gary Marcus writes:

In case you missed it, yesterday Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote what may prove to be one of the most consequential essays of the year, if not the decade: 3,500 words on the current AI situation that (at least to some degree) advocates for a “pacing” of AI development, which Sam Altman and Elon Musk quickly endorsed.

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.

Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon. https://t.co/1YhhIybZX7

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 12, 2026

Dario is right https://t.co/EwKgqQGaUo

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2026

We should all salute their tentative agreement to slow down the acceleration of this technology, given that not one of the AI companies seems to have good control over it. I hope they will sign in blood, and put actual teeth in their agreement, and that the government will hold them to it and force it to become something substantive. If Dario catalyzes all that, god bless him.

And I especially love Dario’s commitment to transparency; Sam seems on board and I hope Elon is down for that, too.

But yeah, there are some reasons to be cynical, too. [Continue reading…]