Why Does Arvind Narayanan Say OpenAI and Anthropic Are Choosing Not to Slow Down?

Arvind Narayanan says the companies can unilaterally slow down and are choosing not to. He calls the choice almost specifically an OpenAI and Anthropic problem, and a culture problem. The belief underneath is that racing to superintelligence is the only thing that matters, and the open question is whether the result is safe superintelligence that will save us or unsafe superintelligence that will kill us.

He says the companies are a bit of an echo chamber. Economic bottlenecks limit the benefits of AI, so the winner is not whoever races to superintelligence as a company or as a country. A company that recognized the bottlenecks would have a commercial interest in slowing down voluntarily and in making existing models more usable. The companies claim external forces are pushing them. He says the push is internal culture.