TL;DR: Basic economics to AI research suggests that making frontier R&D more expensive will reduce its pace, shifting our median timelines outward and lowering FOOM risk. This is probably true even if only one major geopolitical player does it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged in Econ 101 classes that an action made more expensive by some means (costlier inputs, government regulations, etc.) will be done by people less often. Yet, for some reason, people often forget they can apply this to the action of producing novel scientific or technological research - something I claim is probably still the dominant FOOM risk factor of today.

(I don't plan to back up that claim rigorously here today. For now I will simply (a) point out that figuring out good boundaries to any boundary problem is often harder than solving the problem itself, and (b) clarify that I do consider training new more advanced frontier models to be a pretty good starting point for what counts as 'novel scientific or technological research' in my definition, even though you could well argue that by this point it's just an implementation detail. If you think, however, that e.g. we're a few API wrappers or Selenium sessions away from turning GPT-o3-pro into an actual FOOM risk, well, it's certainly possible, but I find myself doubtful of that.)

Research has to be done by someone^[1]. There's no a priori reason to suspect that that someone is granted protection from that Econ 101 principle just because we rightfully consider research to be a vaunted profession. History overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that when research is very expensive, relative to other things one could do with their time, it simply doesn't get done. At the extreme end, Homo sapiens with cognitive capabilities similar to where we are today first hit the evolutionary scene about 300,000 years ago, but the majority of scientific research actively discussed today is from the last ~0.1% of that time we have spent post-Industrial Revolution.

All of this adds up to a very boring hypothesis: If the act of doing AI research become more expensive for people, then less of it will be done, and our chances of entering FOOM will be lower, or equivalently, our median AI timelines should shift outward. Boring is good! We like boring hypotheses around here.

I often hear criticism and skepticism of the "AI policy" and "Pause AI" folks,...

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