- Anthropic suggests a “slowdown or pause” on AI
- AI may soon begin to develop itself, the 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 developer Anthropic has published a lengthy new blog post suggesting “a meaningful slowdown or pause” while we all catch our breath.
Authored by Anthropic executives Marina Favaro and Jack Clark, the post centers on the idea of AI evolving 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 may 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 before, and he’s quickly getting better at writing code that both works and can be understood by human engineers. In fact, Claude now catches bugs that the best programmers at Anthropic previously missed.
While humans are still better at seeing the big picture and context outside of the task at hand, the blog post says this is something else that AI may soon catch up to — though this part is less clear. If and when that happens, AI may escape our control, and this is where the proposals for a freeze on AI development come in.
A growing anti-AI sentiment
Anthropic calls for global freeze on AI development from r/technology
“If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its enormous implications, we think that would probably be a good thing,” the Anthropic team writes. “But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious players catch up with the technology, it could leave everyone less secure.”
With that in mind, the blog post floats the idea of a “global coordination mechanism” to slow or halt frontier AI development — which, of course, would require competitors like OpenAI and Google to promise not to try to leapfrog ahead in secret. During the break, more of AI’s future potential and possible security measures could be worked on.
Anthropic says it will “organise conversations” with governments, researchers and AI companies to see if it will be possible to put the brakes on development at this point. If we don’t do it now, we could lose the opportunity entirely, which is why Anthropic wants to ask these questions now.
Out in the flesh and blood world, a noticeable 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 lead in the market and create hype for its upcoming IPO — though many share the same security concerns raised in the blog post.
“It’s regulatory capture,” says one commentator, pointing out that this is something AI companies regularly do. “They want to build a moat around their business.” Another Reddit post frames the scenario more vividly: “Wolf with a bloody maw and overstuffed belly says it’s time to stop eating meat for a little bit.”
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds.
The best laptops for all budgets
