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Start free trial →Halftime Report · September 2026
This came right after news that OpenAI had shelved the launch of a new model over safety concerns. Altman says OpenAI is pacing its progress, which sometimes means not training a model, and rejects the reading that it amounts to a pause on AI development.
…And do you worry that he looks at a headline like this and says this counts as a pause here? Again, I would put this in like the normal course category of, you know, often we build a model, we test it, it doesn't meet our standards, we change it, we launch it later. But as we have talked about,
…and can rely on us for the models we're putting out into the world. We are now in a period where the models are getting so good so fast that we think it is prudent and wise to make more progress on, since we were talking about safety alignment monitoring, so that we can continue with progress.
But I think this idea of pacing is really important. It's not just like stop it because we don't want smarter models. Of course we want better models. It is make sure that we improve the areas we need to confidently and safely continue with progress. And I think pacing doesn't always mean slowing. And I think that's something that has confused people.
Yeah. It means doing it in a responsible way with guarantees that the world can rely on.
Hugging face. We got to talk about that for a second. That was just this watershed moment. And it feels like we've had examples every other day since then. Did you underestimate at the time the depth of these issues? I mean, there's been reports that there are thousands of these. Has it surprised…
We're trying to, I think part of the way we want to do this is to really over-communicate and be extremely transparent. So there's nothing else that I'm aware of or that we're aware of that is as serious as the Hugging Face incident, but we are trying to put out every small or otherwise case we can…