The call came from inside

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki published a post arguing AI development should slow down across the entire industry, not just at his own company.

“no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence”

Timing that raises eyebrows

The post landed just days after OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, its business-focused model, and amid fallout from the Hugging Face incident.

We are past the line

Pachocki says machine intelligence has started to exceed human capability in ways that reshape things, and the field crossed that line without a manual.

“machine intelligence is starting to exceed that of humans in transformative ways”

Nobody knows how it works

His core worry is not capability but understanding. Deep learning research is still trial and error, so the systems outrun the science explaining them.

“study of deep learning-based AI is largely an experimental science”

AI building the next AI

He points at OpenAI's automated research assistant and recursive self-improvement, where a model helps design its successor, as the reason to choose now.

Two levers, pull both

Option one: strengthen alignment and monitoring and keep humans in the loop. Option two: coordinate a slowdown. Pachocki says do both, plus government coordination.

“The main levers we have are either steering the process to strengthen alignment and monitoring alongside the AI and find ways to keep people in the loop”

Will anyone actually stop

A slowdown only works if rivals join, and no company wants to be the one that blinked. TechRadar's verdict on the odds is blunt.

“It doesn't seem incredibly likely.”