A pause continues to be utter and complete nonsense and it always will be.
1. Let's make planes safer by not making planes!
2. What exactly happens in a "pause"? Do labs get to keep working and we all just get to sit on our hands waiting for this eureka moment?
I guess someone gets to keep their checks while we just bring the economy to a crashing halt based on a few people's vague ideas about some imaginary future problems that they came up with while huffing glue and reading Dune!
3. Who will fund the labs when they are not putting out new products?
I guess VCs will continue to just give them 100s of billions out of the goodness of their hearts!
4. What actually justifies a pause?
Apparently, the wonderful world of imagination! Theoretical future problems that haven't happened yet.
Like massive job losses! Um, jobs are increasing including in the areas most affected by AI, like coding, so I guess not that.
So what? I know the jobs apocalypse is coming because I can imagine it and imagination is reality, right?
Maybe advanced AI weapons?
Ah, so the government will pause weapons research too?
Well no, they will keep doing that anyway because they always do that. It's what governments do.
Okay so we're going to ban Chat Bots while the government keeps making weapons? That should solve everything we're worried about with AI!
Well then what about recursively improving models that grow to superintelligence overnight?
Yeah that's not really a thing. That's the plot of an Avengers movie.
Models are bound by the same real world constraints we are like compute (brains/chips) and time (will this drug have side effects in twenty years can only be known in twenty years) and fuzzy multiplicity (not right or wrong but right-ish and wrong-ish means you can't make a reward signal for "is this the right decision for my business") and the subject/object paradox (the thing improving is judging its own improvement. Yeah chew on that one for a bit.)
But I imagined AI overcoming every real world constraint instantly so it's true!
5. How would we know we did everything we needed to do in a pause? How do we know when it's over?
We dont. We just want a pause now because we want it! Don't you see my pause ⏸️ emoji? It's nice right!
6. Who gets to decide we are ready to unpause?
The government or the people!
Great, because vague ass platitudes like this always go well for concrete policy design.
Looks, none of this is real.
It's theater.
It's not real policy. It has no basis in reality. It's a mass hallucination.
It's pushed by people who believe in magic and magical solutions.
And anything that comes out of it will do infinitely more damage than the imaginary thing they were trying to protect us from in the first place.