this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Any pause will have to be a global treaty; the unfortunate reality is that we're in an arms race now, and despite Sanders' threats otherwise, I don't think there is going to be much will to pause in the US while China keeps developing.
And to be clear, I think it would be every wise to pause development and, afterwards, keep the pace slow. We know how to make "AI" more capable, but we don't know how to make it stay aligned with human goals. The technology is useful and isn't going anywhere, but that doesn't mean we have to develop it as quickly as possible without regard to the real dangers it brings with it.
We’re not in an arms race. That’s part of the bullshit Anthropic and like want you to believe. LLMs are not nukes. LLMs are a fad with most benefits having been to coders, presuming they were already good coders.
25 years from now we’re either going to still be in this “arms race,” or we’ll have better clarity on how the billionaire class misled us all.
Stopping development will do us more good than the harm of perusing a perpetual wealth transfer in the name of a fake arms race.
Even if it were an arms race. Slowing down means you eventually speed back up in a better direction. Why would you want to be so gun ho about what’s clearly an argument for progressing with arrogance toward the technology, because someone else might discover something first? What?
The chatbot labs don't have 25 years. They might have 2.
Which is why tech CEOs love to promote it. They know it'll never happen.
"Alignment" is almost entirely a myth cooked up by AI companies who want to make their word generators sound scarier than they are. There's no such thing: the next word generator generates next word. It's unpredictable because it's built that way. "Hallucination" and "going rogue", all poor terms and pathetic attempts to fearmonger and humanize, are identical functions to "working" and "aligning".
The "it's just inevitable" cliche rears its ugly head again.
That cliche is the worst. If applied to anything else you can see how absurd it is. Like NFTs aren't going anywhere, crime isn't going anywhere, etc.
Except NFTs were never used to nearly even close to the same amount as AI, it had much less usecases and the one that did "catch on" was idiotic.
Crime is a symptom of a problem, not a technological advancement, apples and oranges.
AI the tool is never going away in the same way the internet is never going away. (Barring our entire civilization collapses and we lose knowledge/connectivity/life lmao)
"AI is never going away" neither did NFTs nor crime, nor anything else really. We should try to stop these awful companies from doing awful things.
Alignment is a real thing, though it can be a less than apt description. Mostly the goals you write out and the goals you want to happen not being the same thing. You can also have alignment issues where the dataset doesn't match the real data in some way and the classifications break down. (I am not an AI defender I am very anti-AI)
Woah, we're talking LLMs here, this is not a secret military technology. And China is very open about the developments made there - you can freely study and reverse engineer plenty of Chinese models, and see all the weights out in the open.
This whole race about them is, in my opinion, nothing but trying to pump the bubble even faster, churning the economy in the process and playing on gullible or self-interested politicians. Countries will be just fine assessing risks and then moving on.
It's a one participant race. They're throwing fears about Chinese LLM because of the fact that many of their models end up being open-source, and they know if they don't get people cemented into their models before some open-sourced Chinese alternative manages to meet(or even exceed ) their performance. No company is going to pay them money because they're just gonna run it themselves for way less than subscription costs.
right now, they acknowledge that the non-US alternatives for the models are gaining traction and are getting pretty dang good, and that scares them, so they've moved over to customer lock-in hoping that the effort it would take to move from a subscription model over to one of the alternative models wouldn't be worth it for a company. A US only pause would almost certainly leave them dead in the water.
It's beyond "an arms race." AI has become a commodity that's everywhere and it's being used and developed by zillions of completely different groups all over the world with wildly varying use cases and completely different goals.
At this point, trying to ban it would be like trying to ban dandelions from growing.