This very much sounds like a West-only AI cartel proposal and, in fact, if you read Dario's essay - under the very telling "pacing within democracies" chapter - he specifically says he'd need the US government to issue an "antitrust waiver" for this.

The plan transparently looks like this: agree among themselves not to compete too hard, get an antitrust waiver to make it legal, and while they're at it, get Washington - under the veneer of "safety" - to kneecap Chinese competitors because only "democratic" models can be in this "safe pacing" club.

I'm not even exaggerating: Dario pretty much writes this explicitly.

There are 3 steps to his plan and step 2 is literally: "Frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress" -> the "unchecked AI progress" that would need "limits" is simply AI progress that happens outside their agreement. Another word for it is simply competition.

He also explicitly writes that "a key part of pacing within democracies is to keep democracies’ AI lead over autocracies as large as possible." You can't possibly be clearer than this

https://nitter.kareem.one/RnaudBertrand/status/2099019556769656854

If you pair the above (including https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier from @loathesome_dongeater@spectreofcommunism.boo post) with the below...

US urged to consider military strikes to stop China achieving AGI first https://www.scmp.com/news/us/article/3366284/us-urged-consider-military-strikes-stop-china-achieving-agi-first ...

... then it looks like an attempt to take a further dive into war economy while maintaining investor cash flow and delay economic collapse. The thing I am not sure about is what their strategy will be about the critical minerals bottleneck; maybe raid their "backyard" (the Americas) and double down on influence in the Heartlands. I wonder in doing the former they will be inadvertantly accelerating:

https://chateauschmatte.substack.com/p/theses-on-mexicanism-americanism

Sounds like a euphemism for "the Chinese are going to catch up with our models, so we want big daddy government to ban open weight models."

"pace the frontier" maybe is some techbro slang for "hyperscaling is not working, people are protesting and it's too expensive, we need to focus in make it cheaper and faster with less infrastructure

"third party evaluators" maybe is techbro slang for "we need to create another way to make investors give us more money to avoid masive use of chinese LLMs by enterprises"

"Our next models are showing little to no improvement."

Let’s run this through the ol’ techgrift translator…

BEEP BOOP BEEP BEEP

Our plagiarism machine is seeing diminishing returns and we’re beginning to be called on our bullshit by even the most credulous of the investor class and we need to pivot to the next grift while retaining our techno-prophet schtick

There's something about the way American politics churns out new words and phrases to mask its persistent failings that makes me viscerally ill.

Pace the frontier. Fuck my arse...

"Pace the frontier" definitely reads like a euphemism for "substitute competitive R&D with industry capture." Having third-party evaluators only makes sense from the capitalist standpoint if you're hitting walls and want to look like you're doing something even though you are going nowhere fast. When capitalists are knuckling down on developing competitive edge, the last thing they want to do is slow down to have a third party looking over their shoulder.

What this says to me is that they see the writing on the wall of China closing the gap, have lost faith in their ability to outpace them, and so are turning to the usual capitalist methodology of "speak dishonestly and swing a big stick."

Out of easy gains, out of investor patience, out of power, out of water, out of public goodwill to expansion. But no its AI "agents" becoming those from the matrix and doing a singularity, thats the stopping block.

"Oh gosh, we cant just give you the promised wonderland our god-machine will spawn. Its too scwary. We gotta put chains on god first, and thats gonna take awhile, but keep the money flowing tho. We just gotta pace ourselves bro, make sure we get it right, and regular payments, and we'll all be eating lotuses in no-time."

Sadly, they aren’t that dumb. In Amodei’s essay, he writes:

Do not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, and crack down on chip smuggling operations and remote access to data centers outside China. Chips will be the main determinant of China’s AI strength.

Crack down on unauthorized by companies in authoritarian countries. Distillation of frontier models allows lagging companies to narrow the gap using a fraction of the cost it would take to develop their own AI independently.

Of course, this is a naked attempt to defend what remains of US technological hegemony, but there is still much the west can do to hurt China’s progress. For example, the recent DUV machines China developed require western components such as mirrors from Zeiss.

"pace the frontier" maybe is some techbro lingo for "hyperscaling is not working, people are protesting and it's too expensive, we need to focus in make it cheaper and faster with less infrastructure

"third party evaluators" maybe is techbro lingo for "we need to create another way to make investors give us more money to avoid masive use of chinese LLMs by enterprises"