The People Building a Way to Slow Down the AI Race

In the corner of a nondescript office in Sheffield, a city in the north of England, a compact server full of Nvidia chips is whirring away.It’s a microcosm of the huge data centers springing up all over the globe: town-sized, energy-guzzling computers that are the worldly manifestations of frontier AI models.Here in Sheffield, on these eight chips, engineers from the consultancy Amodo Design are piloting a monitoring system that they hope, one day, might find its way into every data center, allaying the fears of AI researchers who are concerned that the technology they are building may destroy the world.In late July, more than 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies signed an open letter warning that their AI is quickly becoming so powerful that humans may soon no longer be able to control it. Slowing the pace of AI development, they warned, may become vital in order to allow more time for safety research, and thus avert catastrophe. But slowing down, they wrote, is essentially impossible, due to intense competition between companies and countries. The AI race is stuck in an arms-race dynamic, these top scientists say, in which one team slowing down would only hand victory to riva...