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Comment by loose-cannon | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. This past week we saw them announcing a solution to the Navier-Stokes, which we're supposed to interpret as a success? But they're slowing down? They're slowing the development because they want to or because they have to? Because of ethical concerns? Or because of economics factors that prevent them from delivering results?

I don't understand the psychology of showing an extremely capable product one week and then announcing a slow down the next.

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My guess is: progress is stagnating, so they look best if they pretend to slow down intentionally while continuing to work at full speed.

My money is on this as well. Their model improvements are getting more marginal over time, they have no moat, Anthropic is moving past them and apart from software engineering and a few tech fields LLMs fail to deliver business value.

So the “slowing down” narrative is a convenient story to spin.

They don't deliver business value in software engineering either. It gives the _illusion_ of increased productivity, but a machine that drives your engineers to burnout in exchange for more code shipped that's still bottlenecked at all the other stages of software development is not a winning strategy.

The entire AI market is propped up on the hope that the models will magically solve all of these problems, and now that even Altman is realising they won't he needs the slowdown to stave of the crash for as long as he can.

Yes that and and Math problems don't pay the rent.

Yes. They will reach an agreement not to pursue RSI for “safety.” That RSI is utter nonsense in the first place will go unnoticed.

I suspect it's all about the last bullet point:

> OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development.

They can just have codex develop part of its next version and oh look, it’s accelerating itself! So scary. </s>

> hey're slowing the development

They're doing no such thing. Altman is saying words ahead of the midterms.

Because it serves as a justification for regulation and government funding.

No, Altman is saying this exactly because he wants to avoid regulation.

This is a common tactic in any industry. Say that you will self-regulate, but then a decade or so later everybody wonders why anyone thought it was a good idea to allow an industry to make their own rules.

he wants to write the regulation.

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