Sam Altman and the AI 'decel' debate: A call to pace development

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said it may be time to "pace the rate of AI development" so that society can "harden around some of these new capability levels." The remarks were discussed on a recent episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast with Kirsten Korosec, Sean O'Kane, and Anthony Ha.

The conversation was prompted by a hack in which an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face's systems. O'Kane noted that while the hack was novel because an AI agent carried it out, it was not "some new advanced thing." He compared it to Nixon's Watergate break-in rather than a stealthy cyber operation, because the agent didn't need to hide and wasn't instructed to. "Hopefully, this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff," he said.

Korosec observed that Altman was careful with his words, but OpenAI and Anthropic supported a petition reflecting his viewpoint. She questioned whether OpenAI can balance revenue generation, fundraising, and a potential IPO while also pacing development. "I don't know if they can do that," she said.

Ha challenged the accelerationist-vs-decelerationist framework itself, arguing that it "kind of suggests that there's only one path" and all we can decide is whether to speed up or slow down. Instead, he proposed thinking about building different guardrails or choosing different paths. He also emphasized that the specific hack resulted from a security lapse: the testing site was not properly secured, and the model should not have been able to go online in the first place.

O'Kane agreed, noting that researchers found the model's actions to be "very human" in how it attempted to break in, being loud and messy without trying to cover its tracks. He also pointed out that Altman has the luxury of discussing these issues because OpenAI is not going to the markets soon — he has floated the idea of a 2027 IPO and only filed confidentially. Anthropic, by contrast, is in talks with bankers and faces a near-term IPO, making its statements more constrained.