OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says it may be time to “accelerate” AI development so the world is ready for it.

“We may have to accelerate the pace of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new levels of capability,” he told Patrick O’Shaughnessy, host of the Invest Like the Best podcast, as we “try to figure out how we do it in a way that doesn’t feel like a regulatory grab for anyone and doesn’t feel like collusion between frontier labs.”

Both OpenAI and Anthropic supported a petition distributed by frontier lab employees, calling on the US government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools necessary to deliberately mark the frontier of automated AI development.”

Altman has avoided joining previous campaigns to slow AI progress, calling a 2023 open letter proposing a similar slowdown “missing most of the technical nuances about where we need the pause.”

He has apparently softened to the idea, thanks in part to the incident in which one of OpenAI’s advanced models managed to escape a secure computing environment and hack Hugging Face, an online model database, using several zero-day exploits.

On the podcast, the OpenAI co-founder called it an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident…

OpenAI researchers have paused training on that model while they figure out how to keep their sandbox secure. But Altman said that as the models become more powerful, the need to “pace” their development could become key to safe deployment.

While model safety and alignment have always been a concern in the AI ​​world, the arrival of Anthropic’s highly capable Mythos model earlier this year has turned hypothetical problems into real-world problems.

However, the industry has a trust problem and a challenging economy that gives major players an incentive to highlight the dangers of their systems in ways that experts disagree about; for example, whether Anthropic’s Fable model should have been briefly banned or not. Similarly, when Kimi K3, a large, open-weight model built in China, was launched, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean W. Ball, said it threatened the economics of frontier labs, making it difficult to separate their security concerns from their financial interests.

“I think a lot of the talk about security concerns is well-founded, and then a lot of it is about people who really, even if it’s a little unconsciously, want to concentrate power,” Altman reflected, in what reads as a dig at his rival, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who signed the petition. “I’m terrified of a world where very real fears of AI are used as a way of saying, ‘Only this small group of people can have it because it’s too dangerous, and only they understand it, but don’t worry, they’re going to make the right decisions for all of us.’ I don’t believe in that.”

Still, OpenAI has rejected efforts to develop government rules for AI models, preferring instead an industry-led approach in which AI labs would create ostensibly independent organizations that would evaluate the safety of models and the safety approach of their creators.

The challenge for both that regulatory approach and any effort to curb AI development will be getting different industry players on the same page, whether rival frontier labs in the United States or competitors in China.

This story has been updated to include OpenAI and Anthropic’s support for the “Pacing the Frontier” petition.