Should the frontier slow down

By mid-September, three long-standing competitors had each said, in the same week, that the pace should slow down, and a number that had never actually been calculated became the question everyone was forced to answer.

The sequence turned out to run further back than the coverage did: 1,134 lab employees asked for pacing in July, and OpenAI's chief scientist conceded the alignment point six days before Amodei's essay. As of September 17th the argument has a second axis. Nobody disputes that evaluation cannot keep up with models that work over month-long horizons; what is now open is who ends up holding the capability if external releases slow while internal work does not.