Sam Altman is ready to decelerate

山姆·奥特曼准备放慢脚步

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that it may be time to “pace” AI development so the world will be ready for it. “We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,” he told Patrick O’Shaughnessy, the host of the Invest Like the Best podcast, while also “trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs.”

OpenAI 首席执行官山姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）表示，现在或许是时候“放慢”人工智能的发展速度，以便让世界做好准备。他在参加《Invest Like the Best》播客节目时告诉主持人帕特里克·奥肖内西（Patrick O’Shaughnessy）：“我们可能需要调整人工智能的发展节奏，给自己留出足够的时间，让社会能够适应这些新的能力水平。”同时，他也在“思考如何以一种既不会让人觉得是监管俘获，也不会让人觉得是前沿实验室之间串通的方式来实现这一目标。”

Altman has avoided signing on to past campaigns to slow AI progress, calling a 2023 open letter that proposed a similar slowdown “missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause.” Apparently, he’s softened on the idea, thanks in part to the incident where one of OpenAI’s advanced models managed to break out of a secure computing environment and hack into Hugging Face, an online model database, using several zero-day exploits.

奥特曼此前一直避免签署任何减缓人工智能发展的倡议，他曾称 2023 年那封提议暂停开发的公开信“缺乏对我们需要在何处暂停的技术细节的把握”。显然，他的态度有所软化，这在一定程度上归因于此前发生的一起事件：OpenAI 的一个先进模型成功突破了安全计算环境，并利用多个零日漏洞入侵了在线模型数据库 Hugging Face。

On the podcast, the OpenAI co-founder called it an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident…[t]his is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally.” OpenAI researchers have paused training on that model while they work out how to keep their sandbox secure. But Altman said that as models become more powerful, the need to “pace” their development could become key to safe deployment.

在播客中，这位 OpenAI 的联合创始人称这是一起“极具科幻色彩的网络安全事件……这是我第一次有如此深刻切身感受的安全事件。”OpenAI 的研究人员已经暂停了该模型的训练，同时正在研究如何确保其沙盒环境的安全。但奥特曼表示，随着模型变得越来越强大，对开发节奏进行“把控”可能成为安全部署的关键。

Employees at OpenAI and Anthropic have already begun circulating a petition using similar language. While model safety and alignment has always been a concern in the AI world, the arrival of Anthropic’s highly capable Mythos model earlier this year has turned hypotheticals into real-world problems.

OpenAI 和 Anthropic 的员工已经开始传阅一份措辞类似的请愿书。虽然模型安全和对齐一直是人工智能领域关注的问题，但今年早些时候 Anthropic 推出的高性能 Mythos 模型，已经将这些假设变成了现实世界中的问题。

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

然而，该行业存在信任问题，且严峻的经济形势促使主要参与者有动力去夸大其系统的危险性，而专家们对此意见不一——例如，Anthropic 的 Fable 模型是否应该被短暂禁止使用。同样，当中国开发的大型开放权重模型 Kimi K3 发布时，OpenAI 战略未来负责人迪恩·W·鲍尔（Dean W. Ball）表示，这威胁到了前沿实验室的经济利益，使得人们很难将其安全担忧与财务利益区分开来。

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

“我认为很多关于安全担忧的讨论是有根据的，但其中很大一部分是关于那些——即使是潜意识里——真正想要集中权力的人，”奥特曼若有所思地说道，这番话听起来像是在挖苦他的竞争对手、Anthropic 首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代（Dario Amodei）。“我非常害怕这样一个世界：人们利用对人工智能的真实恐惧来宣称，‘只有这一小群人能拥有它，因为它太危险了，只有他们才懂，但别担心，他们会为我们所有人做出正确的决定。’我不相信那一套。”

Still, OpenAI has pushed back against efforts to develop government rules for AI models, instead preferring an industry-led approach where AI labs would create ostensibly independent organizations that would evaluate the security of models and the safety approach of their makers. The challenge for both that approach to regulation and any efforts to slow AI development will be getting the various players in the industry on the same page, whether they are rival frontier labs in the U.S. or competitors in China.

尽管如此，OpenAI 仍反对制定政府层面的 AI 模型监管规则，而是倾向于由行业主导的方法，即由 AI 实验室创建表面上独立的组织，来评估模型的安全性和开发者的安全方案。无论是这种监管方式，还是任何减缓 AI 发展的努力，其挑战都在于让行业内的各方达成共识，无论他们是美国的前沿实验室竞争对手，还是中国的竞争对手。