The AI Slowdown Debate | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:01)
We're back. Did anything happen over the weekend in tech, or was it kind of mellow?

**Jordi Hays** (0:06)
It was a crazy weekend. There was a lot of news, a lot of back and forth about pacing the AI debate. I was in the hospital, because I got rhabdo, it was brutal, but I am recovering, fortunately.

**John Coogan** (0:16)
Explain rhabdo, because it sounds really scary, and it is bad.

**Jordi Hays** (0:19)
It can be very bad. Fortunately, I did okay. I got an IV, I got some medicine, broke a fever, got through it, and I'm healing up, but it happens, and it's the dumbest, dumbest illness you can possibly get. It comes from working out too much and not being hydrated. Very avoidable. Hopefully, AI can find a cure. If there's even a 1% chance that AI can find a prevention for rhabdo, it's worth any amount of risk.

**John Coogan** (0:45)
Pushing forward.

**Jordi Hays** (0:45)
Yeah, we must push forward. No, lots of debate over how fast we should push forward.

**John Coogan** (0:50)
We have never missed an episode for being sick.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:53)
Yeah.

**John Coogan** (0:54)
And I realize that because someone's asking me the other day, what do you guys do when you're sick? We just keep going.

**Jordi Hays** (1:00)
I mean, I did talk to the doctor. They said, do you want a doctor's note for work? No.
I kind of laughed.
But I do think that this job can be done while sick because you're just sitting in a chair having a conversation. But I might be a little bit slow today. So bear with me if I'm not the sharpest on any of the questions. Before we get into the pacing AI debate, what happened with the US Open? Give me a little tennis update. What happened? It's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, so you know it's important news. Tennis is US Open climaxes and back and forth duel, but there was something interesting.

**John Coogan** (1:36)
So Ben Shelton, the American, lost.
And what was notable was that when he actually hit the winning shot and won, he went back and was getting ready for the next point. And he starts looking around and everyone is standing. You can see people in the crowd are standing up and cheering and he slowly realizes that he won. By checking the scoreboard. And yeah, it just became very obvious that he was so focused on the next point. He was not actually not looking at the scoreboard at all. It was just like flow state, just playing. That's awesome. And I'm sure a lot of venture capitalists out there, we're seeing that. And they're like, yeah, all that matters is your next investment. You shouldn't even know when one of your companies, your seed companies are going to IPO. You should be so focused on the next.

**Jordi Hays** (2:30)
I think a lot of people that don't like VC Victory Labs would appreciate that too. It's like, we get it. There was an acquisition. Let's focus on what you're doing right now.
I also liked the cameraman work. I saw a clip of the scoreboard was counting down. There was zero, zero, seven seconds left. Who did they cut to? Pierce Brosnan, 7 himself. I thought it was nice camera work. Shows you that there's levels to the game of live production.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:55)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (2:56)
You got to, those little touches. Clearly, that was just spur of the moment.
That's not something that's scripted. That's just someone being creative in the moment with the tools that they have, the switcher basically. Anyway, the pacing AI debate. I wanted to start with some history here, and then we can go through the timeline of what actually happened since we got off stream Friday. Then all the news breaks, of course. But the pacing the frontier goes back to July 28th of this year.
There was a pacing the frontier statement, an open letter. It was signed by employees and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta, and a bunch of other places talking about this idea of pacing the frontier.
Then the same day, Sam Altman publicly said, we may have to pace the rate of AI development. Two days later, OpenAI tells Axios that OpenAI shaped the petition's language, and Altman had discussed pacing with White House officials. So stuff was happening in DC. This was back in basically the very beginning of August, very end of July. Then August 18th, OpenAI publishes something called Pacing Model Development in an Era of Cyber Critical Capabilities. OpenAI said it actually slowed scaling and paused a major RL run. There was that two-week training pause that happened on August 31st. Anthropic, official Anthropic Post explicitly discusses pacing the frontier. So the idea is spreading and calls for coordinating pacing mechanisms. And then on September 12th, it was actually Saturday morning that Dario dropped the essay. We must pace the frontier, turn the concept into a much bigger public Anthropic campaign that everyone's talking about today. So the rollout of this was pretty, pretty quick. And there's a few key things from Dario's essay. It hit the timeline at 7 a.m. Pacific. He was up early posting. Perfect time to get a lot of likes on a banger. You got to feel something. Know everyone else. There's no fundraising news happening. Drop your essay early Saturday morning. Let people digest it with their morning coffee. Elon was clearly engaging. By 8 a.m., Elon endorses it. 9:30 a.m., Sam endorses it.