Brighter isn't better and more is less. The AI slowdown is nigh, no matter who says what

There has been much chilly weather in the sunny meadowlands of AI futures. Fortunately, to use an indecently inappropriate adverb, the rest of the world isn’t really looking, being too busy chewing its nails over the very many other intimations of disaster. Sure, rebel swarms of attack agents breaking out of the labs isn’t a good look. OpenAI delaying its IPO and a new model launch likewise. All these things soak up whatever bandwidth the news media have to AI right now. Putting them in a bigger context, that of promises made and not kept, problems known but not fixed, the observable risk-reward ratios as models develop, we may at last start having a sense of what sort of crisis awaits. Actual crises are frequently triggered by crises in confidence, themselves caused when frameworks of assumption stop standing up to reality and wishful thinking. …