The AI Debate Is Missing The Most Important Question

We’re having the wrong argument about AI.Most conversations still seem to end up in one of two places. AI is about to change everything or it is massively overhyped.You see an AI system creating an app, solving a difficult math problem or doing in minutes what used to take a person hours. Then someone else posts a screenshot of ChatGPT failing to count how many r’s there are in the word strawberry and says, look at this thing, it’s useless.I do not find either position particularly helpful anymore.For me, now, it’s not about whether AI is impressive, but whether we are adapting quickly enough to what it is becoming. We’re not.Why AI Companies Are Starting to Talk About Slowing DownI read the new essay from Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. His argument is, in simple terms, that the companies building the most powerful AI systems should slow down the rate at which they increase their capabilities. Not stop, but slow down.That is quite something.One of the people competing at the very front of this race is saying that the race itself may be moving too quickly. Now, of course you can be cynical about that and you are probably right to be. Anthropic has commercial interests. So does OpenAI. So does Google. So does Microsoft.But I think we have become far too quick to dismiss an argument simply because the person making it has an incentive. An incentive can make someone biased, but it does not automatically make them wrong.How AI Could Accelerate AI DevelopmentThe thing that is worrying everyone at the moment is that AI is increasingly helping humans build better AI. Engineers are already using these systems to write code, test ideas, analyze results, find problems and accelerate research. Those improvements help create the next generation of systems.Those systems then become more useful in the development of whatever comes after them. This does not mean an all powerful superintelligence is secretly improving itself in a basement somewhere. Although social media is...