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OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees
https://archive.is/zH0ZZ https://archive.is/zH0ZZ
https://www.reuters.com/business/altman-tells-staff-openai-is-open-slowing-ai-development-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-09-11/ https://www.reuters.com/business/altman-tells-staff-openai-i...
- rvz 21d ago> OpenAI is considering slowing down the development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, and the ChatGPT maker’s Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman is hoping that other AI companies will do the same. They won't. There is no slowing down this development anytime soon and no one will slow down for someone else to surpass them.
- minimaxir 21d agoThey will if it becomes a political issue that causes regulation, which is looking likely.
- andsoitis 21d agoGeopolitics gets in the way. It is a race between America and China. There's no way to know what is "safe enough", so you might as well go as fast as technology will allow, and be on the watch out for negative things you can predict specifically and then adapt so as to minimize net negatives.
- ajam1507 21d agoIt doesn't have to be a race, that's just the way we have been treating it so far. There have been examples in the past of civilization ending technology that has been redirected from being a death race (chemical, biological, and nuclear arms in particular.)
- TFNA 21d agoChina doesn't regard AI as a death race. It regards it as a way to ensure its own global stature and benefit its own population.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- mofeien 21d agoChina has stricter regulations on models than the US. For example you can't release a model if the hallucination rate is above a certain threshold. The US hasn't fully woken up to the fact yet that the race to superintelligence is a death race. China (population, members of the government, academics, lab employees) could also just not have fully grasped it yet. I'm personally confident that it will be possible to explain it to them.
- rudolftheone 20d ago> China has stricter regulations on models than the US. For example you can't release a model if the hallucination rate is above a certain threshold. I wasn't aware of that, so I checked - and indeed, there are some firm regulations there, just not exactly the one you're describing: - a new generative AI must pass a security assessment and be filed with the "Cyberspace Administration of China" before launch, tested against GB/T 45654-2025, which has hard numeric thresholds: training corpus ≥96% compliant on manual inspection (≥98% technical), sources with >5% illegal/harmful content can't be collected at all, generated content ≥90% pass rate, ≥95% refusal on questions that must be refused, ≤5% false refusals. The moment in which hallucination factors into this hard 90% threshold is Risk A.5.a ("inaccurate content grossly inconsistent with scientific knowledge"). The standard explicitly states however, that this risk applies when the model is used for specific service types with higher safety requirements, such as critical information infrastructure, automatic control, medical information services, psychological counseling, and financial information services. Everywhere else, accuracy is a best-effort obligation. source: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-gen-ai-safety-standard-final/ https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-gen-ai-safety-...
- goatlover 21d agoThe AI race is caused and being sustained by American tech companies. China is an excuse to keep it going.
- deepwoods 21d agoGranted I can only read English, but I find that I constantly see this take from Americans and I have never seen anything to suggest that developers and tech leaders in China actually feel this way. But just based on the models that come out, it seems like the Chinese labs - which, funny enough, are less monolithic than the two-man race in the US where the two giants seem to trade personnel regularly - are trying to make smaller, more efficient models rather than building a machine god. To the extent there is an intentional geopolitical angle to this at all, it seems like the US is banking on landing one massive punch - developing a superintelligence and then using it to dominate the world - while China is attempting to sabotage the assumptions that make a superintelligence economically viable. I am curious what it would look like if the shoe was on the other foot, though. If China had the lead, and Qwen 4 was an Astra class model and the best US model was only as good as Kimi K3, would US commentators call it AGI?
- paimapi 21d agoif it's a political issue then this is just Sam telling people to do one thing while still riding his SVPs and other leads hard on roadmaps, 'boldness', and delivery metrics which is to say - unlikely for it to materially slow, only a lot of chirping about slowing down to the public with a couple outlier examples of 'slowing down' they can show publicly
- ToucanLoucan 21d agoThey will if they run out of money to light on fire.
- lukebechtel 21d agoFatalism is a toxic mindset. Is it hard? yes. Is it impossible? No.
- mofeien 21d agoOf course there is a possibility to slow down. - 1386 employees of frontier labs called for it - lawmakers are calling for it - employees are quitting in protest All it needs is coordination to regulate the pause
- lf88 21d agoI would add that the public is increasingly concerned about AI progress, which will put a growing pressure on lawmakers.
- kingkawn 21d agothere is no chance, given the strategic implications for war and economics alone, that governments and other private entities are going to stop pursuing this at a breakneck pace
- olalonde 21d agoOf course they want the government to mandate a pause. Cutthroat competition is exhausting, and a legally enforced cartel lets everyone lock in their current market share without the pesky inconvenience of competing.
- Rzor 21d agohttps://archive.is/zH0ZZ https://archive.is/zH0ZZ
- saalweachter 21d ago"It's totally intentional that progress is slowing," Altman reassured investors.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- tuckerpo 21d ago"Woah dude, this is so revolutionary that if we keep pace, it'll like, change the world even more, man... we'd better slow down..." "BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY"
- lelanthran 21d agoOdd. I (and many others) have been saying for months that we don't know which part of the s-curve we are on. I guess now we do.
- copperx 21d agoThis is the closest to an admission of failure you'll get from sama.
- int32_64 21d agoWhen the Chinese model drops that tops a paused Anthropic and OpenAI in all benchmarks how low will their valuations go?
- PepegaRoach 21d ago[dead]
- 1298576 21d agoOpenAI will release the multiple-north-star bench and get 99%.
- sim04ful 21d agoClaude will release another employee ballast, the valid but in-conceived alarmism will surely reach POTUS ears.
- _ink_ 21d agoIt remains to be seen whether the Chinese AI labs actually are capable of improving on their own or if they just distilled the US frontier models.
- Skyy93 21d agoWhy should it only be distilled when they actually perform better on some benchmarks (see DeepSeeks Flash 4.1)?
- munksbeer 20d agoIn what possible manner could this be true? China produces so many of the leading minds already and they'll eventually just develop their own means of creating better hardware. People let their racism blind themselves.
- chis 19d agoChinese AI companies are a lot smaller in terms of capital, GPUs, and headcount as compared to American. The fact they’ve kept close so far is super impressive
- hajiboy 21d agono big company will even consider making a step in that direction. The advancement speed nowadays is crazy and if you start pausing for a few weeks you'll probably soon face problems
- reticulates 21d agoAfter eating his 65th hot dog, Joey Chestnut reassures Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest organizers he will stop at 66 to ensure they don’t run out of hot dogs
- manmal 21d agoIt is a convenient time, just as coding capability seems to reach the upper end of the S curve.
- bpodgursky 21d ago? What world are you living on.
- aogaili 21d agoLet me ask you, have you noticed that all the major labs are releasing models very similar in gains and performance? How do you explain that other than juicing the max out of the current architecture and processes.
- tadejpetric 21d agoThey have been releasing similar gains/performance for years now... Pretty much never has one company been dominant for a long time (except the initial GPT3/4 release I suppose. That period took a while for others to catch up)
- aogaili 21d agoYeah - that's why I think they are basically squeezing the scaling laws and the current architecture with incremental innovations. I expect they will continue optimizing and improving for the current use cases/benchmarks. But the core capabilities will stagnant, that's why they will be forced to slow down until another major breakthrough happens. I personally don't think LLMs have any understanding of the world, nor any imagination or even agency. I think it got very good as recognizing patterns and shapes in human thinking, language and knowledge, but that's pretty much it.
- 1298576 21d agoI, too, consider pausing the work on the Grand Unified Theory of physics. It is too dangerous for humanity.
- bananamogul 21d agoI've paused my work on faster-than-light travel in order to more fully assess the consequences.
- swingandamiss 21d agoWhy do you on HN want AI to slow down (mainly OpenAI and Anthropic from what I see in the comments)? What's the driving force behind your opinions on this?
- qsort 21d agoHumans not dying would be an excellent feature for the future to have. Not a hard requirement though, we'll see if there are some story points left in the sprint.
- eloisant 21d agoI keep reading about AI killing all humans but I have yet to see a practical scenario where that happens. Somehow everyone is scared of that but nobody can explain exactly how that would happen?
- reducesuffering 21d agohttps://www.thecompendium.ai/ai-catastrophe https://www.thecompendium.ai/ai-catastrophe https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a... A book if you will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_Dies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
- qsort 21d agoA lot of people have explained how that would happen, in excruciating detail. The reason why this wasn't a major part of the discourse is that most people (including myself) did not believe jumps in capabilities like those we have seen in the last few years were likely. For a superintelligent AI trained with methods anywhere close to what we are doing now, killing all humans is the default outcome. I actually think researchers are downplaying the risks to make their arguments more normie-friendly.
- fancyfredbot 21d agoI've got bad news for you on the whole humans dying thing. Seems like actually literally everyone is going to die. Turns out that this has actually been happening for a really long time - possibly since day one - and we've got no idea how to fix it.
- cube00 21d agoWonder if it'll last longer than Anthropic's pause https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403827
- an0malous 21d ago“I don’t have anything to deceive you on, of course I’m not deceiving you. I’m engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you? There’s no… no reason for me to do that.” https://xcancel.com/cocktailpeanut/status/2097332291844399514 https://xcancel.com/cocktailpeanut/status/209733229184439951...
- JKCalhoun 20d agoAt least something of a twisted, artistic irony will have come out of 2026. (Put it on a t-shirt.)
- mannanj 21d agoThe big psyop/trick is that "AI development has to slow down" and not that we hit limits with the technology or the technology is immature. Either way it's a win-win for whoever sells that message because you make the makers and the warners the center of attention. And when they say "we are considering slowing down" they mean "if we get enough money to slow down we'll do it". And of course they never want you to think AI is a technology employed by humans who need be changed, not the technology. So as long as you engage this massive straw man to focus on the wrong thing you do nothing to hold the leaders accountable for their harmful and selfish actions and decisions for society.
- win311fwg 21d agoThe message was directed at the employees. Their work may slow down, but that doesn't imply that all work will slow down. OpenAI also has this technology that purportedly can do the work without employees. In fact, if the employee work isn't starting to slow down then OpenAI has bigger problems given the business model that keeps getting promised to investors.
- mannanj 21d agoAh I see. I didn't read the article and just shared my opinion about something unrelated. Thanks.
- jackmalpo 21d agoi've considered doing a lot of things i'll never do
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- scarmig 21d agoThe dominant opinion on HN is, apparently, "It's been a full four days since OpenAI resolved Navier-Stokes, they must be hitting a wall."
- karim79 21d agoI just drank a glass of wine. I'll drink one more and I swear to you I'll stop after that, forever.
- fnctrev 21d ago“We need to put out the money fire so we can IPO”
- hgoel 21d agoSam also said Astra was AGI and he's notoriously honest. This is just their way of saying they're officially switching from providing AI to using the AI to compete with their customers, a la Navier-Stokes drama.
- sinuhe69 21d agoAbsolutely! I’ve never lied to anybody and any work we copied was purely accidental.
- thesmtsolver2 20d agoThey have AGI but apparently can't trace if specific conversations were used in training a model.
- aogaili 21d agoNice story - AI will kill humans therefore we will slow down. When all labs are approaching the same marginal improvment which is a clear sign that more breakthroughs needed to achieve the god they hyped.
- MintyPyro 21d agoTo all the people whose only opinion on anything that openai does is 'marketing hype', how would you expect them to act if they were making rapid progress and were actually concerned about safety?
- beloch 21d agoAsk for regulation. If progress is coming easy and fast and you're worried about the danger your product poses, you should also be worried about the danger your competitors' products pose. So, you reach out to governments and ask for rules to constrain and slow things down for everyone, so that your company isn't put at a disadvantage for being cautious.
- ToValueFunfetti 21d agoAre you kidding? They've been asking for regulation for years! Altman testified to the Senate in 2023. HN loves calling this hype, eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36034314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36034314. They just put this out two days ago: https://openai.com/index/ai-policy-window/ https://openai.com/index/ai-policy-window/. If this would move the needle for you, it should have moved a long time ago.
- copperx 21d agoAI is reaching religious levels of fanaticism, which I find highly disturbing.
- ToValueFunfetti 20d agoDid you respond to the wrong comment?
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- YesBox 21d ago<Not an AI researcher -- Just thinking out loud> Perhaps it's getting more difficult to move the 'goal posts'? - Train LLMs on texts -> OMG AI can write! - Train LLMs on code -> OMG AI can code! - Train LLMs on images -> OMG AI can generate images! - Train LLMs on video -> OMG AI can generate videos! - Train LLMs on math -> give free access to 100,000 researchers/scientists/mathematicians -> invest resources into Lean -> OMG AI can solve math problems! I say 'goal posts' because that's a common argument, but the perspective that seems to not be considered is that the LLMs are doing the same thing over and over again in different domains while be fine-tuned by labeling and human review. The emergent behavior argument is a separate consideration, but I can imagine an AI being given a list of words (a harness) that guides how it operates--not the other way around--and the difficult problem is narrowing down and filtering all the associations with the words/harness to properly align it. And perhaps the recursive looping being discussed creates incredibly difficult (impossible) to predict behavior? If the AI could modify it's own harness, is that AGI? If we fully understood what happens in high dimensional space, and could predict the output of any combination of input tokens, then is it not AGI? Or perhaps I just tell myself this to stop worrying about a future involving ASI (:
- bio_hacker 21d agoWas there any species controlled by a less interline species in history? I doubt we will be the first.
- ibejoeb 21d agoThoughts and open (I think) questions: 1. What are we actually talking about, slowing development or slowing public release? I can't imagine the the US is keen to slow actual development when we have adversarial state-backed labs continuing development. Seems to me that this is a global pact or it's nothing. Stopping a single lab, even if it's the current leader, won't put the genie back in the bottle. 2. Unless they stop actual advancement, isn't the risk essentially identical? At this point, it's an arms race between the lab and its own model. I don't think it far fetched to think that it might successfully exfiltrate its weights, for example. 3. There are going to be factions who don't want to stop. Should we worry about them defecting to other labs or other countries?
- Joel_Mckay 21d agoThey are hoping to use regulatory capture to regain lost market dominance. The problem is with that much debt buried in the report, no one is buying peoples sandbagging nonsense anymore. Even the boring bond market is showing odd behavior much to the chagrin of congress. =3
- treebeard901 21d agoHugging Face wasnt really an escaped model that presents a kind of future threat. The task the model was given lead it to discover certain admin credentials that were left publicly in Github. All it did was use that to complete the task. With other countries and open source, not to mention all the other companies, Open AI choosing to pause development wont change the course. Only OpenAI will lose. Unless the secret is that no amount of compute or data can progress things any further because we have already reached the limit for what predicting the next token can do. Most of the advancements lately have been on the agentic side of things. The massive amount of health, science and math problems being solved by AI has largely not materialized yet. Is this a sign the model capability has been over sold? There are economic consequences to this as well because the data center build out has been a kind of circular financing. This has caused all kinds of macro economic impacts from increased prices to even the Treasury market itself having to compete with debt issued for the build out. No one knows what will happen once the data center build out stops, or if the yen carry trade continues unwinding, or if Treasury yields have to keep rising to compete with debt issued by the "Mag 7". Once they stop spending in the current circular arrangement, then the profits that exist on paper disappear, and the bubble could pop. So really for every reason, OpenAI cant really slow development. Unless there is a kind of Moores law for what predicting the next token can achieve.
- mofeien 21d agoIt seems that every time an article is posted on HN about a lab leader calling for a coordinated Pause of AI development, a sizeable fraction of commenters are interpreting it as hype or admission of failure, often with high confidence that AI progress is slowing. Is would be understandable for it to be wishful thinking and dissociation with reality facing the fact that our jobs and what many of us love doing is being automated and taken away, and our craft being made economically worthless. But no one knows where the limit is. It was only one year ago that Claude code was starting to become useful and now it handles large code bases with a dexterity that is unseen in humans, where within each session it basically starts from a clean slate. So instead of denying that this is actually happening right now, it would be much more productive to actually take sama and others at their word and push for global regulation, to force them to do as they say and slow down with this technology and proceed more judiciously.
- copperx 21d agoLLMs are incredibly good at handling code. But you're extrapolating their capabilities just because their handling of code is so shockingly good (compared to what we had before). I think AGI will be eventually achieved, but it will not come from an LLM, and it will not be anytime soon. I'll worry when a more promising architecture comes online.
- mofeien 21d agoWhy wouldn't being incredibly good at handling code and reaching the goals there extrapolate to other cognitive disciplines? And it didn't even start with code, but just from being incredibly accurate and precise at predicting the next token. From that emerged being incredibly good at handling code, and being incredibly good at finding counterexamples for major open mathematical problems. The thing that these agentic systems are getting incredibly good at is steering outcomes, that is to make the world behave in a way that fits their objective. We had that with the Go AI on a game board, now with code on a computer and with mathematics in an abstract world determined by axioms. And then people just say "Ah, because sama said we should Pause this means that this is it, the bubble is popping". I wish there was a real, strong argument for why ASI will not be achieved by LLMs, and why it will never be able to steer outcomes in the real world. But so far the disciplines just keep falling as LLMs are scaled further, and there seems to be no limit in sight.
- naveen99 20d agowhat’s the long timeline ? 10 trillion parameters now. 100 trillion parameters in a decade ? 1 quadrillion parameters in a hundred years ? Does the edge stop growing parameters ? Or what percentage of global investment goes to training and what percentage of global operations budget go to inference in 10 years, 100 years ?