I used AI to explain the AI pacing drama, with fruit.

The Besties React to President Trump and Jensen Calling Out the Doomer Hoax @Chamath: “How crazy is it that we had @POTUS and @JensenHuang debunk a hoax live on stage? That is the craziest thing.” @DavidSacks: “And everyone's freaked out about this. I think what's happened is really irresponsible. A somewhat technical debate in Silicon Valley has now been seized on by actors within the political system. We're a couple months before an election, and they're blowing it up and trying to make it ‘the issue,’ and they're freaking people out.” @Jason: “They're causing chaos when they could be having these conversations internally, as Jensen pointed out.” Chamath: “That was the most powerful point. Research to actual production software is a big leap, and so just keep your head down and do the work. Seems like they don't care about the thing itself. They care about the drama around the thing.”

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.