The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Dario Amodei is a 40-something dude who is obviously very, very intelligent. But intelligence is not wisdom and his "essay" here can easily be read as someone who opened a can of worms and doesn't know (or can't accept) that he won't be able to put the worms back in. But he's going to try because he believes he owes it to humanity to try.
It's hubris in its most basic form, even if the guy who has it looks nice and wears shawl-collar sweaters.
The fact that he would suggest this despite preparing for an IPO is an even stronger signal that it's in good faith -- it will almost certainly delay or reduce the valuation of the IPO.
No it won't.
This is a call for a "safety cartel"[1] in which the dominant firms become more entrenched against competition by colluding to limit the progress would-be competitors can make in the market.
No, the essay does not talk about "stopping development". That's a very clever sleight of hand made in the essay to get readers to draw this false conclusion.
It just talks about building AI at a "balanced rate". Untangling the corporate speak, this amounts to essentially "go full steam ahead, but have more eval oversight before release".
So, i think they're hopeful for the help and terrified of the harms and are maybe trying to slow down on the amplifier of those effects for now.
More like they've realized that the foreign models are quickly catching up and are able to sell their services cheaper to people thanks to China subsidizing their AI sector.
Elon, Dario and Sam are banding together to restrict AI to avoid competition and losing profit. They simply want the government to heavily regulate the technology so that they can reign it in with full control.
I bet you would be making the same comment if crypto was being developed by Anthropic. Dario would write a long essay, lecturing us on the dangers of it. He would argue that this technology can be used to by terrorists and should be heavily restricted.
This disaster of a PR strategy is not going to produce the outcomes Dario says he wants. It's going to make people hate him. Most importantly for his goals, it's going to make Chinese labs hate him--and they already hate him, because he treats them as basically terrorists. So if there is a "pacing", it won't include China, and thus may as well not happen.
That leaves only two conclusions, and really only one:
Dario believes what he says about safety, but does not understand politics and is prone to very counterproductive action, and therefore can't be trusted at the helm of a leading AI company.
or
Dario is lying about his goals, and therefore also can't be trusted.