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Slowing down...and then what

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The argument over whether to “pace the frontier” says more about how we see power and responsibility than about kilowatts and GPUs. Dario Amodei’s call for the major labs to voluntarily pace their most advanced work — coupled with independent third‑party safety evaluators, common standards and some international buy‑in — is a pragmatic attempt to replace the false binary of full throttle or full stop. It’s telling that Sam Altman and even Elon Musk have signalled sympathy for some version of this; they can read the political weather as well as the technical tea leaves. From a European vantage point — where the EU AI Act is moving from text to texture — the language matters: “pace” invites stewardship, whereas “slow down” can sound like abdication. Still, there’s a hard truth beneath the rhetoric: open‑source communities will not pause, Chinese labs will not wait, and the knowledge required to push capabilities forward is already diffuse. Trying to slow global research with only volu...
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Stopping AI research and being against datacenters?

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Every few months the word “pause” drifts back into the AI conversation, as if a handbrake could be gently lifted on a runaway technology. Elon Musk famously signed the Future of Life Institute’s 2023 open letter urging a six‑month halt on training models more powerful than GPT‑4; Sam Altman told the US Senate that licensing and international coordination may require temporary stoppages at certain capability thresholds; Dario Amodei’s Anthropic has gone furthest in operationalising that idea with a “Responsible Scaling Policy” that contemplates pausing when risk evaluations trip red lines. The research community remains split: Nature and other journals have catalogued both the prudence of breathing space and the risk that a pause entrenches incumbents or simply drives work elsewhere. In practice, what we’ve had is not a pause but a politics of pacing—soft law commitments, model evaluations, and the UK’s Bletchley Declaration—all inadequate substitutes for a shared, enforceable theory o...
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What can the gaming industry teach us?

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Walking the halls of Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, you feel the hum of a clock that everyone can hear. A game has a window, a stage, a promise—when the curtain rises, there is no quiet reschedule. That tension doesn’t produce panic so much as a peculiar clarity: teams decide what matters, cut what doesn’t, and harden the path from build to booth. It’s a useful mirror for IT consulting, where deadlines drift more easily; treating go‑live like an opening night invites the rehearsal discipline, risk staging, and calm showmanship that audiences—and clients—notice. There is another lesson in how studios tell their story. Watching a team pitch a new title to press and fans, you see months of engineering distilled into a feeling you “get” in seconds. The trailer forces a resolve that many corporate programmes dodge: what is the one sentence we want remembered, and do all our choices serve it? In consulting, we too often let features crowd out meaning; a sharper narrative not only sells better...
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