ModelTalk: Pacing the Frontier

ModelTalk regulars Nathan Lambert, who writes Interconnects, and writer Jasmine Sun join to work through a week in which Dario asked the industry to slow down and Trump called the whole thing a conspiracy.

Why the Hugging Face hack broke through where years of extinction talk didn’t, and how Bernie, Tucker, and Rogan ended up on the same side

What “pacing” even means: Nathan’s case that nobody can measure the frontier, and why it still beats “pause”

Who gets Slack access: METR’s monopoly on trust, CAISI’s $10 million, jury duty for AI researchers, and why nothing survives without legislation

Will China slow down too? Zhipu and Moonshot turning the crank, military secrets leaking into Claude through proxy routers, and the MSS waking up

The Sacks clap-back: whether product liability does the job, and what an eighteen-month pause costs in cancer cures and vibe-coding projects

Send in Demis! plus Lu Xun as the antidote to Chongqing TikToks, and what DeepSeek’s Chinese name owes to Qu Yuan

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