Slow the race. Strengthen the safeguards. Keep the benefits in view.

Why the pressure?

Capability Curve from METR (fast) vs. incremental accomplishments in safety (small blocks like COT)

Show a block for each release of a significant point release in one of the major LLMs (presumably looks like it's more and more blocks)

Decisions that can't be reversed: Public shareholders about to create 100x more pro-race sentiment, financial stakes

The pace of new releases

Link to hear each release as popcorn in the microwave, to give a visceral feel for what's happening. A little classic guitar solo inserted in the one month where there is no releases. The one from football and commercials, probably from Creedence or somesuch

Not matching the pace of understanding

"Within six to twelve months such a swarm could be capable of "taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet", potentially causing hundreds of billions in damages."

Job loss begun

What can go wrong?

Countries+companies racing in "A race that no one can leave". There is a natural tension between "manageable AI" and "fast moving AI"

To evaluate: A checkpoint shared by every racing lane. Visual: Bring back the lanes from element 2, but now each passes through the same inspection checkpoint. The checkpoint has three prominent labels: “Defined scope,” “Independent verification,” and “Conditions for proceeding.”

Tiered harm ladder — A vertical stack from near-term

Labor displacement, misinformation, bio-misuse uplift

Bad actors empowered

Loss of power Concentration of power

Long-term (loss of control)

CEO quotes via ChatGPT & Anthropic

What do they have to lose by saying this? Many billions

One summary: "Several leaders directly responsible for developing frontier AI have explicitly acknowledged the possibility of human extinction or loss of human control, and some now argue that capability development must slow until safeguards catch up."

Bill sez: This is watered down by its false belief Zuck never acknowledged that at its worst, it puts humanity in peril

On May 30, 2023, Altman, Amodei and Hassabis were among those endorsing this statement:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Altman

"AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies." Altman, 2015, Business Insider

"“Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” Altman, 2015, His Blog

"At a StrictlyVC event, he described the bad-case outcome as: “lights out for all of us.” TechCrunch, 2023

Alt: January 2023, StrictlyVC interview: the bad case is "lights-out for all of us"

“Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” 2015, His Blog

"In an interview conducted September 11 and published September 12, he said AI beyond human control is “absolutely” possible." 2026, Fortune

May 2023, the CAIS one-sentence statement he signed alongside Hassabis and Amodei: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority"

Amodei

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” 2026, His Blog

"Its most alarming near-term scenario concerns increasingly capable, misaligned AI swarms: “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet [in early-to-mid 2027]” 2026, His Blog

"[AI] could decide that it is justifiable to exterminate humanity.” 2026, His Blog

"“There’s a 25% chance that things go really, really badly.” 2025, Axios

Pichai

"[Discussion about the probability that advanced AI could destroy human civilization, Pichai said] “I think the underlying risk is actually pretty high." 2025, Fridman

"If deployed wrongly, it could be very harmful... Does that keep me up at night? Absolutely." 2023, 60 Minutes | IT Pro

Zuckerberg

"His August 10, 2026 essay discusses AI acquiring enough power that it: at worst puts humanity in peril" 2026, Essay.

“it is not clear that there is any way to expect benevolence” 2026,

Demis Hassabis

“advances on the frontier are outpacing our understanding of the technology” 2026, His Blog

Elon Musk

"With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon." 2014, Time

Expert probability dial — A gauge or dot-plot of published AI researcher surveys on catastrophic-risk odds. Key design choice: show the spread, not just the median, so it reads as "even the optimists aren't at zero" rather than as a single scary number.

A moving walkway that people are trying to catch up with. Visual: A fast-moving walkway carries changing job descriptions forward. Workers, educators, and public institutions walk alongside it, carrying training materials and updating plans. Show people adapting—not simply disappearing.

What would slowing down achieve?

Historical precedent strip for cooperation over eras

Use the time, don't lose the time

"What slowdown means" menu — A closing panel showing the concrete policy asks (compute thresholds, eval requirements, licensing, liability) as a spectrum from light-touch to hard pause. This is the off-ramp: after the argument, here's what's actually being proposed. It prevents the reader from concluding the ask is "shut it all down."

What to do? Split into two sections

High-Minded

Donate to AI Institutes

Contact local Senator, request a meeting to help them understand what they're about to see

Hold the bastards to account (?)

Support Plan A, the most considered idea on the market (and its creators)

Boring Pragmatic (unfortunately essential 😩)

Support efforts to start measuring environment for irregularities (esp air)

Draft appropriate taxation for companies and/or tokens

Create & update a prediction market-esque proportional guess at which type of catastrophe is most consequential at 10% or more (life-or-death struggle), and which is most consequential at 50% or more (job loss)

Capability curve (hero chart) — A (log-? linear-?) scale line of benchmark performance or training compute over time, with milestones annotated. Its job is to establish "this is moving faster than most people think." Everything below references this line.

Companion "Another test bites the dust " a list of all the benchmarks that

CEO quotes – There's been some doozies. Estimate how much money these people lose on behalf of their preference not to be culpable for widespread destruction.

Countries racing in "A race that no one can leave" – Several parallel lanes containing generic AI labs and countries. Each has the same small speech bubble: “We can’t afford to fall behind.” Curved arrows connect the competitors, indicating that each responds to the others. Suggested caption: “Individually rational. Collectively risky.”

A checkpoint shared by every racing lane. Visual: Bring back the lanes from element 2, but now each passes through the same inspection checkpoint. The checkpoint has three prominent labels: “Defined scope,” “Independent verification,” and “Conditions for proceeding.”

Expert probability dial — A gauge or dot-plot of published AI researcher surveys on catastrophic-risk odds. Key design choice: show the spread, not just the median, so it reads as "even the optimists aren't at zero" rather than as a single scary number.

Historical precedent strip — A horizontal timeline of prior technologies where humanity deliberately paused or governed: Asilomar (recombinant DNA), nuclear test bans, CFC phase-out. Purpose: inoculate against "you can't stop progress." Each tick can link visually back to the payoff diagram (#4) as examples of accepting a small cost to avoid a large one.

Open-letter / signatory wall — A word-cloud or portrait grid of notable figures (across industry, academia, and safety orgs) who've called for a pause or slowdown. Establishes that this isn't a fringe position; sits near the expert dial (#3). "The smartest minds in tech can agree on nothing. Except maybe one thing?"

Tiered harm ladder — A vertical stack from near-term (labor displacement, misinformation, bio-misuse uplift) to long-term (loss of control). Shows that "slowdown" advocates aren't only worried about sci-fi scenarios, which broadens the audience. Rungs can be color-keyed to the capability milestones in #1.

"What slowdown means" menu — A closing panel showing the concrete policy asks (compute thresholds, eval requirements, licensing, liability) as a spectrum from light-touch to hard pause. This is the off-ramp: after the argument, here's what's actually being proposed. It prevents the reader from concluding the ask is "shut it all down."

A moving walkway that people are trying to catch up with. Visual: A fast-moving walkway carries changing job descriptions forward. Workers, educators, and public institutions walk alongside it, carrying training materials and updating plans. Show people adapting—not simply disappearing.

Black box illustration — A neural network rendered as an opaque cube with a question mark, alongside a callout: "We can train it; we can't yet fully explain why it does what it does." This is the visual justification for why the slow line in #2 is slow.

An inspection window that reveals only part of a machine – A large, mostly opaque machine with a small inspection window. The visible portion has reassuring checkmarks; pathways outside the window remain unresolved. A clipboard reads “Passed these tests”, not “Safe.” Suggested caption: “Passing a test is not a safety guarantee.”