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OpenAI claims to have paused frontier RL training for now. Altman stated on X:
We have paused some frontier RL training to ensure that we can meet the appropriate alignment, security and monitoring standards for the new level of capabilities in front of us. Model progress is now extremely rapid, and we always said we would take action if we felt that model capabilities were outstripping the pace of safety and alignment.
We care very deeply about AI safety. We believe the entire field will have to coordinate on shared safety standards, but will act unilaterally in the meantime.
We expect confidence in safety to increasingly set the pace of AI progress. We are optimistic about the alignment work we are doing, and we remain committed to making frontier capabilities widely available.
1. Why do investors care whether the financial underperformance is coming from incompetence or prudence?
2. The underperformance was in the past whereas the pause/safety actions start now. The latter cannot explain the former.
Prudence is potentially temporary, but incompetence is long-term. Revenues at any given time are usually taken as a projection of future revenues.
They are deliberately pretty vague about when they paused the training, no? Though it's true that current training doesn't really affect revenues anyway; only deployed models do. Then again, an even more galaxy-brained take is that they make announces like this in general in order to inoculate against investor expectations, but if they do this often enough it works against point #1.
(I'm not saying that any of these are their actual motivations. I'm just describing how these hypotheses would work.)