Speed ↑ · speed timing

Acceleration

Speed of capability itself is the safety lever; alignment improves with compute, defence compounds with offence, and wealth funds resilience.

Mechanism

Accelerate capability development and sustain a minority safety effort inside the same organisation; frozen incumbents are the worst scenario.

Falsification signal

A visible harm large enough that policy overrides the growth coalition (2008 financial crisis analogue).

A strategy held without a falsification signal is not strategy; it is affiliation. Continued support after this signal lands is identity, not bet. See the identity diagnostic.

Self-undermining threshold

overshoot risk

When adopted by more than one actor.

The race dynamic it assumes away triggers. Each actor cuts safety corners faster as the others do.

Every strategy has a stable region where it reinforces itself and an unstable region where pursuit defeats it. The threshold between them is usually narrower than advocates acknowledge.

People on the record

Profiled figures appear first, with their tier in small caps. Each face links to the person and their full quote record. Tag: acceleration.

expertise mix · 7 profiled

Builds frontier systems

Deep ML / safety technical

Applied or adjacent technical

Governance, policy, strategy

Expert in another field

Public-square commentator

recognition mix

Mass-public recognition

Known across the AI/safety field

Recognised inside subfield

Newer or less central voice

A strategy whose endorsement skews to commentators or external-domain experts is in a different epistemic state from one endorsed mostly by frontier-builders. The mix is read carefully across both axes; see the board for criteria. Counts are over the 7 profiled people on this strategy (22 unprofiled excluded).

David Sacks
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Donald Trump
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Guillaume Verdon
Deep ML / safety technical · Known across the AI/safety field
JD Vance
Governance, policy, strategy · Mass-public recognition
Marc Andreessen
Public-square commentator · Mass-public recognition
Richard S. Sutton
Deep ML / safety technical · Known across the AI/safety field
Vivek Ramaswamy
Public-square commentator · Mass-public recognition
Aditya Ramesh
OpenAI DALL·E creator
Albert Gu
CMU; Mamba and structured state-space models
Alec Radford
OpenAI; lead author of GPT, Whisper, CLIP
Ashish Vaswani
Co-founder Essential AI; lead author of 'Attention Is All You Need'
Brian Chau
Executive Director of Alliance for the Future
Charlie Snell
UC Berkeley; LLM efficiency and inference compute
David Luan
Amazon; ex-Adept co-founder
Denny Zhou
Google DeepMind; reasoning team lead
Eric Jang
1X Technologies VP of AI; ex-Google Brain
Jakob Uszkoreit
Inceptive co-founder; Transformer co-author
Jason Wei
OpenAI; chain-of-thought prompting
John Carmack
Keen Technologies founder; ex-Meta CTO
John von Neumann
Mathematician and singularity originator (1903–1957)
Mike Solana
Pirate Wires founder; tech contrarian
Niki Parmar
Co-founder Essential AI; Transformer co-author
Oriol Vinyals
Google DeepMind; Gemini technical lead
Prafulla Dhariwal
OpenAI; GPT-4o lead
Sébastien Bubeck
OpenAI; lead author of 'Sparks of AGI' paper
Sergey Levine
UC Berkeley; robot learning, deep RL
Stefano Ermon
Stanford; generative models pioneer
Tim Brooks
Google DeepMind Veo; ex-OpenAI Sora research lead
Tri Dao
Princeton; Together AI; FlashAttention and Mamba

Load-bearing commitments

Worldview positions this strategy quietly assumes. If the claim fails empirically or philosophically, the strategy loses its target or its premise.

Time

Faster is better because the trajectory is good.

Fails if: If the trajectory is bad, faster is simply arriving at catastrophe sooner.

Coordination

Coordination will fail anyway, defect first.

Fails if: If coordination was in fact achievable, acceleration was a self-fulfilling defection.

Coordinates

Primary leverSpeed (Accelerate)

Acts onspeed timing

Coercionmarket

Actor in controlhumans

Time horizonduring transition

Legitimacy sourcemarket

Conflicts, grouped by mechanism

Lever opposition

same lever, opposite pull

The pair's primary lever is the same; they pull it in opposite directions. A portfolio containing both is internally incoherent on that lever.

PauseBureaucratic slowdownEnergy choke pointSabotage

Frame opposition

incompatible premises

The strategies accept different premises about what AI is or what the binding problem is. They conflict not on lever choice but on the frame that makes lever choice sensible.

Abandon superintelligenceCapability ceilingSmall model firstNarrow AI preservation

Complements, grouped by mechanism

Same phase, different layer

same stage, distinct levers

Both are active in the same phase of the transition but act on different layers (model vs institution vs culture). They cover different failure modes inside the same window.

AI for safety

Stage-sequenced

one sets up the other

The pair is phase-offset: one acts before the transition, the other during or after. The first creates the conditions under which the second binds.

Differential technology development

Adjacent bet

different levers, loosely coupled

Different levers, different directions of action. They reinforce only via the general principle that covering more bets dominates covering fewer.

Catastrophe response capacity

Same-lever reinforce

same lever, same pull, different mechanism

Both strategies pull the same lever in the same direction by different means. They stack: doing both amplifies the pull, at the cost of double-counting in portfolio audits.

Race to aligned superintelligence

Axis position

What the strategy acts onSpeed / timing

Coercion levelMarket

Actor in controlHumans as principals

Time horizonDuring transition

Legitimacy sourceMarket

Source note: Acceleration strategy.md