Thought experiment: could humanity pause AI at the Astra level?
The author asks whether AI development could be frozen at GPT-6 Astra capability, with no training beyond that point, and whether the cost would really be so high.
Could humanity theoretically decide to pause AI development at GPT 6 Astra capability level - with companies not allowed to train past this point - and would this really be so bad? Astra looks pretty good, it apparently appears to be almost at the level of AGI in the sense that it performs at human expert level across nearly all domains. It will apparently enable major new scientific advances. Could we theoretically pause humanity at this level of AI development in order to head off existential risks? Because we are starting to get to the point that rogue agent swarms threaten us. I am just asking this as thought experiment, I am generally very techno-optimist and pro-AI. Human adoption is still at such low rates that the vast majority of educated professionals are still just using AI as a chatbot and many of them are still using older models several generations behind the frontier because they don’t even realise there’s a difference. So even if we paused at Astra level you could still unlock massive economic productivity gains just by getting Boomers to use it correctly etc.