A 3-year AI pause could buy 1000 years of safety work — or just 41, critics model
gleech · x · 2026-10-25
A new analysis models an AI-safety research program during a 3-year regulatory pause, with AI doing the research and humans verifying — claiming a pause could buy '1000 years' worth of safety work. A detailed commentary (shared by Gleech) praises the closed-form model for pricing in human verification, but identifies pipeline leaks: whether safety research is on the critical path, dual-use overhang and early-defection incentives, models' 'safety taste', validity risks (hill-climbing, cheating, undetected sabotage), and actual adoption. Running these filters, the commentator estimates the 'thousand effective years' of inputs yield only 41 years of effective risk reduction — while conceding safety may yet prove amenable to vast engineering efforts.
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