{"id":742399,"date":"2026-08-19T00:38:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T00:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/742399\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T00:38:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T00:38:17","slug":"openais-big-slowdown-by-alex-heath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/742399\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI\u2019s big slowdown – by Alex Heath"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is a good time to slow down,\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told me last week, describing the company\u2019s decision to halt the development of its most powerful, unreleased models.<\/p>\n

The company announced Tuesday<\/a> that it\u2019s implementing new safeguards that will slow its future AI development. The company recently paused training on its next set of models, codenamed Astra, for a little more than two weeks, according to executives, and its largest planned frontier training run remains on hold while the new guardrails are put in place.<\/p>\n

It is the first time OpenAI has made such a move. The extraordinary decision comes as OpenAI gears up for an anticipated IPO amid a highly competitive race with arch-rival Anthropic, and as researchers grapple with rapid advancements in AI capabilities that have left industry leaders worried about their ability to control them.<\/p>\n

The slowdown has redirected two of OpenAI\u2019s most important resources: researchers and computing power. Altman told me several researchers he never expected to focus on alignment\u2014the work of making AI systems follow human intent\u2014recently told him they were switching to it. \u201cWe\u2019ve shifted a lot of compute, not just to alignment research, but also to these new monitoring systems,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI think it is a good time to slow down,\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told me last week,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":742400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-742399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/742400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}