Yakovenko Slams AI Slowdown Push as Profit-Driven
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko fired back at AI industry leaders who called for slowing down AI development due to safety concerns. He suggested that the push is actually about profitability, specifically at a market capitalization of $1 trillion. This notion was met with criticism from some, including former White House AI adviser David Sacks, who argued that top-down regulation could harm smaller startups and open-source projects.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed slowing down AI development in an essay titled 'We Must Pace the Frontier.' His plan involves three stages: giving third-party evaluators access to internal safety staff, coordinating on shared safety requirements among frontier AI companies, and international coordination. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman endorsed the proposal, while Elon Musk simply agreed that Amodei is right.
Markets did not react with alarm to the slowdown talk, with analysts noting that slowing down development does not necessarily mean less spending on AI infrastructure overall. Yakovenko seemed to mock the idea of an artificial pause in AI progress by telling his Codex to use fewer tokens.