China · U.S. · ChatGPT · Fortune Technology
Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, corporate leadership has scrambled with a speed unmatched in modern commercial history
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Pacing, therefore, will neither harm economic output nor choke off the labs’ commercial revenues, because enterprises need time simply to assimilate the capabilities already on the table.
Key facts
- Computers required 50 years, and the Internet and mobile devices demanded 25
- More than 100 recent conversations with CEOs, policy leaders, and AI scientists for their coming book, When Machines Act, have convinced them that the pacing debate has lost sight of first-principles
- Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, corporate leadership has scrambled with a speed unmatched in modern commercial history
- As McKinsey Senior Partner Asutosh Padhi emphasized on air with Fareed Zakaria, technical availability is fundamentally different from economic transformation
Summary
Washington and Silicon Valley have found a new fight to pick over artificial intelligence in “pacing,” or the deliberate throttling of frontier model development until safety, alignment, and society at large can catch up. Both camps have fallen prey to the “Compute-to-GDP Fallacy”—the mistaken belief that every incremental leap in AI model performance immediately translates into macroeconomic output. In reality, Corporate America is already years behind the AI frontier, and the labs’ commercial fortunes will be decided by trust and adoption, not raw capability. The pacing skeptics’ suspicions are not frivolous. AI has plainly reached a critical capability milestone.