Solana Co-Founder Questions Motives Behind AI Slowdown Proposal

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has questioned the motives behind an AI slowdown proposal put forth by Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. In a recent X post, Yakovenko responded to their call for slower advances in frontier artificial intelligence with a sarcastic comment that profitability was contingent on reaching $1 trillion market capitalization.

Amodei's essay 'We Must Pace the Frontier' argues that developers should slow the rate at which they improve model capabilities to allow for more time to test safeguards, study model behavior, and permit outside evaluators to examine their work. The proposal contains three stages: inviting third-party evaluators with access comparable to internal employees, coordinating common safety requirements among frontier AI companies in democratic countries, and international coordination.

Altman endorsed Amodei's call for embedded outside evaluators, stating that OpenAI would commit to having independent evaluators with employee-like access. Musk also expressed support for the proposal, writing 'Dario is right.' However, none of the executives publicly endorsed Yakovenko's suggested connection between pacing and trillion-dollar valuations.

David Sacks, a separate X poster, disputed the need for industry coordination, arguing that Anthropic and OpenAI could slow their own development without requiring competitors or lawmakers to participate. He also raised concerns about product-liability exposure and regulatory capture, but provided no evidence of an agreement between the companies to exclude competitors.