“The Pacing of the Frontier” by Zvi

In the wake of the letter calling on us to prepare to potentially Pace the Frontier, there has been much discussion of when pacing the frontier would be prudent, and whether it makes sense to prepare to do so. This has now been informed by the events surrounding OpenAI training models for months while they had access to a joint de facto message board, which was detected only in the wake of the hacking of HuggingFace by OpenAI's AIs models during a cybersecurity eval. As we find out more about that, a lot of people have grown far more alarmed, as they should given what they previously believed about the difficulty of alignment, about the state of capabilities and about the level of operational supervision, infrastructure, safety and safety culture at the frontier labs. This post will not go further into the details of that incident. It treats that as background to keep in mind, and mostly involves perspectives from before the Black Hat talk. This was originally scheduled for Friday and got bumped. A lot of the disagreements about the need to pace tie into expectations about the default pace of capability advancements. As I [...] ---Outline:(01:24) Danger, Will Robinson(02:34) Progress Fast and Slow(05:02) Statements of Support For Pacing the Frontier(14:00) No One In Charge(14:56) Pacing The Frontier(15:46) Pausing the Frontier(18:16) Senator Sanders Demands A Pause(22:00) Moderate Prudence(25:14) That Escalated Quickly(26:17) If You Are In Mundane Alignment Pivot To Scalable Alignment(30:47) Taking It Fast(31:44) Full Speed Ahead(32:57) Suicide Squad(34:19) Prepare To Adjust Your Pace --- First published: August 10th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WgWoJPKw5b2XTDD24/the-pacing-of-the-frontier --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.