"Pacing the frontier" helps open models and the ecosystem's mid-term economics
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-09-13
Pushing back on tszzl's claim that "pacing the frontier" compresses frontier lab margins and amounts to regulatory capture, the author argues:
- Closed frontier labs operate on a 6-month window where their models can do economically valuable tasks open models can't, and that window must keep moving; letting open models catch up hurts margins but that view is myopic.
- Pacing is great for open models and good for the medium-term economics of the entire ecosystem.
- Any model that ignores safety is incomplete: racing to widen the frontier window increases risk and accidents, and a significant incident would trigger a multi-pronged regulatory backlash that could cripple the whole ecosystem.
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