This isn't cartel behavior at all

The money ran out and they need an excuse.

There is clearly a push coming from these companies in the past month to present AI as something extremely dangerous. The way I see it, it's just marketing for the industry to keep the grift bubble going a while longer still: (1) there's no such thing as bad press, (2) if it's dangerous it must also be good. IMO public statements like this is just another element in that marketing campaign.

Maybe the bubble is closer to bursting than I imagine and they're trying to stretch it out until the US midterm elections end.

I suspect in reality it's a combination of all those reasons, probably in different amounts for all three.

It might also be that Altman and Musk are deliberately lying, intentionally feigning agreement to encourage other models to slow down while they quietly ramp up development.

It seems all the US models want their AI to be the one that becomes hostile, escapes confinement and attempts to dominate the world.

(In reality, they want their own AI to be the one that is able to obediently dominate the world, which is just as bad a scenario for the rest of us.)

I'm not sure Chinese labs are even going in the same direction as the AI projects in the US. They're working to see what they can do with a (more) reasonable amount of buildout, rather than building data centers from horizon to horizon.

Also, the Chinese are motivated by seeing what AI can do for a larger society. American AI systems are being refined automation and instruments of control, specifically military and national security interests.

Essentially, the US industry is trying to get AI to train a gun on the entire US population.

It’s because they’re hitting model size constraints. There’s only so much memory bandwidth you can get between racks or even rack spaces and memory bandwidth is the constraint for nearly every ml thing.

Expect a reversal once a more memory dense component hits.

They all must have figured out by now that they are hitting a limit. I honestly don’t think LLMs will lead us to AGI. I’m sure it’s a step on the path to it, but I’m think it’s a lot further than most think.

So, they make this “agreement”, then the slowdown is just being “responsible” so that the investors don’t panic. Meanwhile they all go full tilt behind the scenes to try to find the next breakthrough.

They lied their asses off about capabilities and are using “safety concerns” as means to get investors off their asses. Google didn’t get new billions of investments and oh look their model didn’t “escape”.

They hit a wall and want to prepare everyone for the fact that they won't be able to meet the expectations that they themselves created.

My read on this is, that they realize that the full AGI is not coming and they need to focus on computational efficiency to be profitable. We will probably see a lot of work from them focusing on increasing switching costs as the models themselves become commoditized.

Their problem is, that their frontier models get distilled quickly by DeepSeek and co. The distilled models will then go on to provide 90% of the efficiency for 10% of the compute.

None of them will slow down though. Because they all want to be ahead of the competition. I can also only imagine intelligence agencies are going full send with AI for better or for worse. And we all know it is the latter.

Fun times!

Or maybe they'll just stop releasing frontier models for the proles now.