- Anthropic Suggests ‘Slowdown or Pause’ in AI
- AI could soon start developing on its own, company warns
- There have been mostly negative responses online.
Even the giant companies at the forefront of AI are suggesting it might be time to take a step back and think about where the technology is headed: Claude’s developer Anthropic has published a lengthy new blog post suggesting “a significant slowdown or pause” while we all take a breath.
Written by Anthropic executives Marina Favaro and Jack Clark, the article focuses on the idea of AI developing itself, known as “recursive self-improvement,” at which point it could get out of our hands very quickly, as AI takes over the business of designing and developing its own models and interfaces.
“We’re not there yet and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable,” the post explains. “But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.” By next year, an AI model like Claude could be able to complete tasks that would take a human coder weeks, according to Anthropic’s calculations.
According to Anthropic’s internal testing, Claude is managing more code than ever and is rapidly improving at writing code that works and can be understood by human engineers. In fact, Claude is now catching bugs that Anthropic’s best programmers previously missed.
While humans still do better at seeing the big picture and context outside of the task at hand, the blog post says, this is something else that AI could soon achieve, although this part is less clear. If that happens, AI could escape our control, and that’s where proposals to freeze AI development come in.
Growing anti-AI sentiment
Anthropic calls for a global freeze on AI development from r/technology
“If it were possible to effectively slow down the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would probably be a good thing,” the Anthropic team writes. “But if a slowdown simply allows less cautious players to catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe.”
With that in mind, the blog post floats the idea of a “global coordination mechanism” to slow or stop the development of cutting-edge AI, which of course would require competitors like OpenAI and Google to promise not to try to advance in secret. During the pause, more of AI’s future potential and possible safeguards could be developed.
Anthropic says it will “host conversations” with governments, researchers and AI companies to see if it will be possible to slow development at this time. If we don’t do it now, we could miss the opportunity entirely, which is why Anthropic wants to ask these questions now.
In the flesh-and-blood world, notable anti-AI sentiment is growing, at least outside of Silicon Valley and coders. Online reactions to Anthropic’s post have accused the company of wanting to protect its own market leadership and generate excitement for its upcoming IPO, although many share the same security concerns raised in the blog post.
“It’s regulatory capture,” says one commenter, noting that this is something AI companies do regularly. “They want to build a moat around their business.” Another Reddit post frames the scenario more vividly: “The wolf with bloody jaws and swollen belly says it’s time to stop eating meat for a while.”
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to receive news, reviews and opinions from our experts in your feeds.
The best laptops for all budgets
