I'm So Confused: Are We Going Faster, Or Slower, Or Just Faking Everyone Out

Two weeks ago, Amodei (Anthropic) published We Must Pace the Frontier, and Altman (OpenAI), Hassabis (Google), and Musk (SpaceXAIZWQ5r) all agreed. But Huang (Nvidia) didn’t. I wonder what Zaphod Beeblebrox thinks. Last week, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 - its first release since the pacing essay - and a few hours later OpenAI dropped GPT-6 Sol and Luna into a price war under Astra. Pacing the frontier is a serious idea that no one seems to be taking seriously. Or is it? Or are they? Then over the weekend I saw another round of articles about the agents escaping. And something nonsensical about the global AI competition between China and the US. Thankfully I don’t read X anymore so I have no idea what the bloviating there was this weekend, although I’m sure I’ll get something entertaining at the end of the day today on the Techmeme email newsletter. The OpenAI write-up on the DNS seemed like it was no big deal, nothing to see here, straightforward ops failure. An RL agent in a…