Microsoft announced limits for future AI models. The company wants everyone to know it's responsible. This comes as the industry slows down frontier development. Frontier development is what we called progress before lawyers got involved.
The tech giant partners with Anthropic and OpenAI. Two companies building the exact thing Microsoft now claims needs limits. It's like hiring an arsonist as your fire safety consultant then holding a press conference about your commitment to not burning things down.
Responsible AI entity. That's what Microsoft wants to be seen as. Not an actual responsible AI entity. Just seen as one. The distinction matters to approximately zero people trading MSFT calls at 3:47pm on a Thursday because they read half a headline on Reddit.
The industry throttles frontier development. Throttles. As if Silicon Valley woke up one morning and decided maybe we should pump the brakes on the technology that prints money faster than any product in human history. More likely the models started costing too much to train and someone had to explain to investors why burning through GPUs like kindling wasn't generating proportional returns.
Here's what responsible means in practice. Microsoft will set limits it defines. Using standards it creates. Measured by metrics it chooses. Enforced by people it employs. Then it'll announce compliance with its own rules at a developer conference while Sam Altman tweets something cryptic about AGI being closer than we think.
Every retail trader who bought Microsoft yesterday because of this headline now owns shares in a company that just announced it's going to do less of the thing that made them buy the shares.
Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash
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