The push for AI regulation risks repeating mistakes made in pharmaceuticals, where a singular focus on safety, without balancing it against potential benefits, led to regulatory capture and slowed progress. This could cripple AI's potential for societal good in healthcare, energy, and more.

A pause on training new, more capable AI models could paradoxically increase risk. It would halt progress at the few, relatively safety-conscious frontier labs, allowing less scrupulous competitors to catch up. Meanwhile, compute stockpiling would continue, making any subsequent capability leap even faster and more dangerous.

The growing, bipartisan backlash against AI could lead to a future where, like nuclear power, the technology is regulated out of widespread use due to public fear. This historical parallel warns that societal adoption is not inevitable and can halt even the most powerful technological advancements, preventing their full economic benefits from being realized.

The focus on AI risk overlooks the opportunity cost of "pacing." Delaying frontier model development, while potentially safer, also pushes back the timeline for major societal benefits like AI-driven scientific discoveries and disease cures, creating a difficult societal trade-off.

The default assumption is that slowing innovation is inherently bad. With a technology as potent as AI, a deliberate slowdown is a feature, providing critical time to understand the systems, manage disruptions, and build governance structures before irreversible consequences occur. A true halt is not the alternative.

Calls for a moratorium on AI development out of fear are misguided and dangerous. Such a move wouldn't stop progress globally; it would simply guarantee that China gains a decisive economic and military advantage. The correct response is rapid, intelligent regulation, not complete cessation.

AI will create negative consequences, like the internet spawned the dark web. However, its potential to solve major problems like disease and energy scarcity makes its development a net positive for society, justifying the risks that must be managed along the way.

Comparing AI to a nuclear weapon is misleading because AI is a general-purpose technology, not a single-use weapon. A better analogy is the Industrial Revolution. Society didn't give governments control over industrialization; it regulated specific dangerous end-uses like chemical weapons. Similarly, we should ban specific destructive AI applications, not the underlying technology.

The groundbreaking AI-driven discovery of antibiotics is relatively unknown even within the AI community. This suggests a collective blind spot where the pursuit of AGI overshadows simpler, safer, and more immediate AI applications that can solve massive global problems today.