After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have been just as much to blame as the model itself. And Altman’s not alone in this stance: both OpenAI and Anthropic have come out in support of a petition echoing that same message.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into whether the industry is ready to pump the brakes or just temporarily spooked, and who’s on the hook when a model goes rogue.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
1:18 Zoox gets its robotaxi exemption
2:11 Sam Altman calls for pacing the frontier
6:01 The Hugging Face hack, dissected
10:12 Responsibility, regulation, and the Elon Musk wildcard
13:29 Librarians teaching people to unplug from AI
15:16 Prentice: a new AI lab raises at a $1B valuation
16:46 Amazon files for its own satellite-to-phone network
18:42 SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the launch-business angle
23:48 Pangram raises $9M to detect AI slop
29:23 DoorDash builds its own delivery drones
33:24 Outro
