The Great AI Slowdown Pivot: Veteran Commenter Calls Labs' Pause Call Pure PR Spin
DavidLinthicum · x · 2026-09-15
Enterprise tech veteran David Linthicum published a scathing long-form critique of this week's coordinated 'slow down for humanity' call from AI labs, calling it the most cynical PR play he's seen in 30 years.
Key arguments:
- No concrete mechanism: None of Amodei, Altman, Hassabis, or Musk lays out an actual failure scenario, timeline, or falsifiable claim — just apocalyptic imagery around 'recursive self-improvement' that resembles faith more than engineering.
- Progress is stalling anyway: Frontier models of the past couple of years offer dazzling demos but underlying capabilities have been roughly flat for two years, with curves driven by scaling budgets, not breakthroughs.
- A convenient narrative: The capital burn is unsustainable and the next model won't deliver the promised leap; calling a pause that was happening regardless lets labs reframe 'our progress stalled' as 'we chose to protect humanity.'
- Entrenching incumbents: The slowdown burdens startups and open source with compliance they can't afford while the biggest players write the rules.
He still takes real risks seriously — misuse, bioweapon uplift, security exploits, data leakage — as engineering problems with engineering solutions.
More from AGI Musings
- What is work for? Cross-national survey of 8,234 adults on meaning in the AI age — soumitrashukla9 · 2026-10-31
- Which universities win top students may hinge on healthy AI-use boundaries, argues researcher — brianryhuang · 2026-10-31
- Researchers debate whether more inference compute can substitute for training compute — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-31
- Five agents can agree because they made the same mistake, krishnan warns with satire — krishnan · 2026-10-31
- Google's earnings offer clearest look yet at the cruel economics of AI search — dinabass · 2026-10-31
- Dartmouth provost who warned of AI cheating resigns over undisclosed AI use — Ars Technica AI · 2026-10-31