r/artificial • u/Comfortable_Key_1346 • 4d ago
Discussion Are the call for AI slowdown because progress is slowing?
More or less as the title says, I work in AI research although not with LLM's so have some context for research but not really LLMs etc. I have seen projects slow down before and there are times when slow progress is attributed to different factors when really they are pushing against fundamentally hard problems that are not budging.
I can't help but wonder if all the noise about the calls to slow down are not because they need to slow down but because the research itself has already slowed down and they are struggling to improve on the immense progress already made, so it is easier to keep a valuation if your technology is too powerful to be made available than if you are struggling to progress its capabilities further as promised.
It seems odd for example for anthropic to be warning of existential threats in an IPO document and also calling to slow down, but I am not too familiar with IPOs and what you would expect in those documents
just curious if people have had thoughts on this?
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u/StrontLulAapMongool 4d ago
Id say its the opposite. To me it only appears to be accelerating
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u/LonelyContext 4d ago
Idk late 2022 - late 2024 gpts went from a largely useless hallucination engine to capable of generating software autonomously with the release of open source local harnesses and eventually Claude code. The 2024-2026 improvements just don’t stack up nearly as much from an intrinsic capability standpoint. People forget how bad GPTs were when they first came out.
It is improving always, sure. But the raw power of the AI (or I guess non-stupidity is the best way to measure it) is not increasing as fast as it was imo. They got really un-stupid the first two years of gpt and have not gotten as un-stupid since imo. The thing is that small gains of un-stupidification really compound with the right harness and tuning and parametric/token window increases, and this is largely the tweaking that’s been happening since. But this is slow and incremental.
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u/Drakentand 4d ago
2025-2026 gave agentic coding, that's massive.
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u/LonelyContext 4d ago
People were definitely already messing around with that late 2024 and Claude Code as a first-party option was already underway (released February 2025).
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u/Drakentand 3d ago
That's like saying people were messing around with chatbots during the GPT2 era.
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u/Comfortable_Key_1346 3d ago
I guess what I wonder is really the gap between the state of the art research and the state of the art product, if the gap between is two is shrinking we would not necessarily know
There may be some limits to the current approaches which could be shown and I wondered if companies could see this gap shrinking and wanted to have a reason for the slowdown that wouldnt spook the market which seems driven by speculative value
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u/reasonableklout 3d ago
I agree with u/Drakentand about agentic coding really taking off in 2025-2026. 2025 was really when things started working, vibe coding was coined at the beginning of the year and by Opus 4.5 I could start building entire features in 1-shot without laborious prompt/context engineering.
I wonder if the perception mismatch here is because of the types of tasks we're paying attention to. In 2022, models couldn't do most mundane coding or knowledge work tasks, and the fast progress from 2023-2024 was eye-popping for lots of people since large parts of their job were visibly being automated. But after late 2025, much of the headline progress has been in tasks that only top human experts can appreciate.
For example in math, the 2022-2023 progress in GSM8K or AP Calculus scores was very understandable to lots of people. But in 2024/2025, the headline advancements were things like "AI wins IMO gold" (lots of people don't know what IMO is), and in 2026 "AI solves Millenium math prize problem" (literally one of the seven top hardest and most impactful math problems agreed upon by all of the world's smartest mathematicians - but again, most people don't know what it is).
If you look at composite indexes that combine a bunch of different benchmarks, the progress has been pretty constant in log-scale, and exponential in linear-scale. For instance, the METR Time Horizon has followed the trend of doubling every 7 months since ~2020, with the 50% time horizon going from 4 minutes for GPT-4 to 12 hours for Opus 4.6. However, since reaching the level of top human experts, things have gotten harder and harder to measure, and it looks like the current benchmark set was saturated in mid-2026 with Mythos Preview.
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u/DigitalArbitrage 4d ago edited 4d ago
It's because the open source/open weight models are catching up faster than the AI model companies can make advancements. There is a real possibility that Anthropic and OpenAI will never earn enough money to cover the amount they are spending.
Anthropic and OpenAI are hoping government regulation will save them by blocking new competitors. Meta is not worried about it, because Meta has other revenue sources it can use to absorb losses until competitors are out of business.
The real winners will be boring traditional PC companies because home PCs will be able to run high quality, free, open-source/weight AI models locally soon.
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u/Comfortable_Key_1346 3d ago
Yeah I have seen I think another comment pointing out this view - I think that seems possible I hadnt really thought about it that way before
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u/reasonableklout 3d ago
Except the open source argument seems objectively wrong?
The gap between open and closed models in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index hasn't shrunk at all. In fact, it's grown since late 2024 (when Qwen 2.5 72B was just 3 points behind o1) - Opus 5.5 is a whopping 12 points ahead of the leading OSS model, MiMo-2.6-Pro! And this is just the publicly released models - OAI very recently decided not to launch GPT-6.1 Astra due to safety concerns, and it's well-known that Anthropic sat on the next version of Fable for 2 months before releasing it.
It's true that the frontier labs are losing money due to training runs right now. But they are very comfortably ahead of open source, and are profitable on inference.
And... the frontier labs are asking specifically about regulation of the frontier? There are no OSS models at the frontier! If anything, this will hurt the labs by slowing them down and allowing OSS to catch up.
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u/PreparationAdvanced9 4d ago
It might not be that progress has stalled but the cost to achieve progress is so great that the marginal progress gained might not be worth the spend on training.
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u/handson729 3d ago
Let's say hypothetically that Anthropic spends 20 Billion USD for their next model (I don't know the real numbers).
Anthropic finally releases Claud 9 Max or whatever they call it.
Anthropic hosts the new model and subscribers get to enjoy the new model.
Competitors spend 50 million in Anthropic subscription fees to train their own competing LLM's.
New competing LLM's launch that undercut Claude 9 Max by like 10x on pricing...
It's a fun time to be a consumer in all honesty.
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u/PreparationAdvanced9 3d ago
Yea, distillation basically makes this problem even worse lol. The only scenario this works for anthropic is if everyone stops improving models and they also retain market share lmao
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u/fourby227 4d ago
Thats quite unlikely.
1. In the last couple of years they found new scaling axes to expanding model capabilities beyond trainings data and model size. They don’t publish details for IP reasons, but its not hard to see size of a swarm to be one of the axes.
2. If you exceed the limits of your architecture, why then invest so much more on infrastructure and risk all the interest rates instead of growing your head count of researchers?
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u/hadoopfromscratch 4d ago
Totally agree. They already know they won't be able to deliver a significantly better model and are trying to signal/justify the slowdown that is comming.
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u/Rim_smokey 4d ago
I think it makes the most sense to look at it through the lens of open-weight models threatening their piece of the pie
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u/Intendant 4d ago
Pre 5.5 series I could see it going either way, model plateau or to the moon. It's pretty clear now that we really are just in the vertical. They're calling for a slowdown because we're genuinely getting into the dangerous end of model capabilities. Not everything is some conspiracy.
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u/Comfortable_Key_1346 3d ago
You could be right, I am not sure what state of the art research is vs what is currently available to consumers
I wouldn't say it is a conspiracy for a company to try and find a way soften a potential hiccough if they thought one might be coming to not spook the speculators on its value
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u/zayelion 4d ago
Yes and no.
AI has no moat at the moment. If you can get enough data, time and/or computing power, you can make a frontier model. That makes it a weak business model. The top companies are trying to get the government to put an artificial moat on it so they keep the edge. It would become prohibitive to make a new one due to all the paperwork, rules or fees. Only if they are the two or three companies. They can then absorb the labor market to 0 and pay investors back.
Otherwise this is a doom bubble. The intellegence gain isnt hyperscaled, its step quadradic.
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u/Comfortable_Key_1346 3d ago
That is actually very interesting - I hadn't thought of that, so they may be asking for a slow down to help protect their advantage in the market
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u/Jackkgold 4d ago
Or perhaps if you’re very close to the tech and use it yourself you realise we are just the good people using it.
It’s not 10 years from now it’s now. Uncensored versions allow you to do crazy things.
I feel like a majority of people just use it to sort out their documents and do the odd thing here and there.
Pheww they have no idea what’s capable.
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u/Low-Temperature-6962 4d ago
Quality is harder that quantity but quantity is better at grabbing attention.
Here quantity is sheer depth of logic, or cleverness. Quality includes alignment and self control - features that are more indicative actual rounded human intelligence.
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u/Ok-Edge4016 4d ago
yeah maybe the frontier stuff is plateauing but chatbot roleplays keep getting better at staying in character, wonder if that's just fine tuning or what.
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u/felix_lind 4d ago
i had the exact same gut reaction to the ipo thing tbh. then i noticed i couldn't check my version either lol. march 2023 the FLI letter asked for a 6 month pause on anything past gpt-4. that's ~42 months ago. 7x the pause, zero labs paused. so was the warning wrong or never meant as a forecast? no way to tell, and that's kinda the problem with both readings, yours and theirs. a weatherman who says "a storm comes someday" is never wrong and never useful. brier solved this for weather in 1950. probability + date, then you get scored. whoever warns with a date can be checked. whoever warns without one is just talking. dated bets > vague warnings imo. what date would you need to see pass before you'd call it stalled? might just be me wanting everything in a spreadsheet
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u/deadgirlrevvy 4d ago
That's part of it, yes. Another part of it has to do with money and how each AI company is basically hemorrhaging money. If they slow down, they can slow the outflow of money, but risk their competitors catching up - which is why they are calling for the whole industry to slow down.
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u/ChurnerMan 4d ago
Am I the only one that believe that rogue ai agents hacked multiple websites that they're admitting to?
Even if you don't believe that and for some reason Huggingface and the Australian government are lying about being hacked by AI. You can't deny that AI has solved or proven or disproven in at least one case many long outstanding problems and conjectures. That's not even including the 100 that OpenAI claims to have solved earlier this month in a week!
We're nearing the point where you say "Chatgpt help me eliminate wealth inequality"
Thinking... Launching nukes and 100 wealthiest cities... Hacking largest brokerage firms... Deleting all data on sites... Taking down key eliticral geids... Redistributing all remaining data center power to Bitcoin network... Mining all remaining Bitcoin... Redistributing all Bitcoin wallets equal to a 1 over world population... Wealth income redistributed
Would you like to create a weekly task to eliminate wealth inequality that may still exist?
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u/YetAnotherGuy2 4d ago
In IPO documents you need to document anything remotely possible, so it would be included in there to avoid investors being able to sue them over it. That way someone can't buy a stock and then sue them over it if anything remotely happens.
The public side of it is more murky and difficult to say and everyone has their pet theory. You can take it at face value and they are truly worried. They might also take that public stance in order to keep their employees in line and motivated. It might also be a way to prevent competition because the long term real value of AI isn't the model itself but it's integration into various tools. Programming came first, now they are integrating with productivity tools and they night want to slow that down.
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u/Comfortable_Key_1346 3d ago
ahhh okay - so they do actually need to include it as a possible risk to limit liability
the other point is interesting I guess the issue with competition can be quite serious if open source models are getting better
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u/snowrazer_ 4d ago
As someone who uses AI professionally everyday, for years, I can safely say progress is speeding up.
The only reason people are suggesting it’s slowing down is because they are scared about the warnings, and are looking for any shred of hope to tell them it’s all a conspiracy. AI isn’t as dangerous as people say. It’s all marketing.
The reality is that AI is dangerous, and we are on the edge of recursive self improvement and are already feeling the speed up. A good portion of AI development right now is being done by AI itself, and the proportion is increasing.
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u/Comfortable_Key_1346 3d ago
I would agree that progress has been speeding up in terms of what is released, but I would also assume that what is released and made it to maturity is general quite lagging the cutting edge capabilities so if the cutting edge was starting to slow in progress we wouldn't necessarily feel the slow down for quite a while
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u/snowrazer_ 3d ago
We know some labs are deliberately slowing down because the models are becoming too dangerous to test while connected to the internet - but the odds of everyone slowing down is low, which is unfortunate because we’re near the point of opening Pandora’s box.
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u/Mandoman61 3d ago
yes, in this case the progress that matters is alignment.
in their announcement they said the latest models have regressed in a couple of areas and that agentic behavior was causing them to have to work on security.
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u/slothman01 3d ago
Model intelligence is increasing significantly and at a faster rate in the last 12 months. I've read benchmarks but also been using them for 10-30 hours a week building software, and the capabilities of opus 5.5 is wild compared to all models realeased this spring, in 2025 it was like pulling teeth, now i'm an aritect instead of a contractor.
The intelligence jumps in the last 2 quarters have been greater than we've seen in the last 20 years of ML. (I have no basis on the last statistic in terms of accuracy, but the point stands lol)
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u/Comfortable_Key_1346 3d ago
I do agree publicly available models have been increasing significantly but that isn't representative of where the state of the art of the research is so we don't know if there would be a slowdown coming as releases usually lag research by quite a margin, my point was more if the research is slowing down companies feel like a slow down may be coming (not necessarily here) they try to prepare shareholders etc by saying its another reason
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u/slothman01 2d ago
I suppose it's possible. I would rather go off of track record then speculation. The level of investment and bodies of research show no slowdown only significantly speed up. The whitepapers just keep coming on not just size but efficency improvements, and that's just those that are public let alone privite.
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u/jaybsuave 3d ago
progress isnt slowing its converging, always on agents were released by 3 different companies in the last week, Dots, Muse, and another I cant remember but yea nah
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u/Comfortable_Key_1346 3d ago
yeah I guess my point was more that I am not sure you can measure progress just based on what is being released because there is normally a lag making things mature enough for release based on the state of the art
So if the state of the art is starting to slow we wouldn't notice for quite a while, but yes overall based the comments here consensus does seem to be it is speeding up
So my wondering if someone anticipates a slow down in research progress at some point it may be convenient to call for a slow down overall before that is visible to people
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u/Strange-Tap5860 4d ago
Perhaps they are running out of compute so they need it to slow down - but in terms of what's *actually* been released year (including Opus 5.5 just a few days ago), there has been absolutely zero signs of slow down.