As Raemon has suggested a format for a short-form content feed, I'm going to go ahead and make one. His explanation of the format:
I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
Edit: For me at least, #2 also includes "writing them up as a full post would involve enough effort that the post would probably otherwise not get written."
I'm not sure the economics really allow for long pauses, you can't really pause indefinitely and then move on once you've done your safety homework, but let's set it aside for a moment.
Suppose that OpenAI and Ant are in front, and they commit to pausing frontier training. The best response from tier 2 labs could be to catch the (perceived) frontier and only then pace. But where exactly is it? You'd likely get to a situation where a multitude of players are clustered around it, all of them quite certain to be a bit behind.
At that point I would expect the least risk-averse lab to have the strongest incentive to take a small step further, because their p(doom/one step further) will be low enough. This lab would be incetivized to use their frontier + model to make some money or solve some problems, and the other frontier labs would know they are now a bit behind. Also, each iteration would make this equilibrium less stable, because of less trust in the other labs.
So unilateral pacing might slow things down, but I'm not sure it produces the stable Pace/Pace equilibrium you're describing. It may instead create a leapfrogging dynamic in which the dangerous territory is eventually entered first by whichever frontier lab is least safety-inclined.
As Raemon has suggested a format for a short-form content feed, I'm going to go ahead and make one. His explanation of the format:
I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
Edit: For me at least, #2 also includes "writing them up as a full post would involve enough effort that the post would probably otherwise not get written."