A slowdown on the AI frontier would barely register for big companies working to adopt AI, for the simple reason that they are nowhere near the frontier.
“Even if the technology stops advancing — turn ‘pacing the frontier’ into ‘halt the frontier’ — we have a decade-plus of diffusion of benefits into the economy with the technology as it exists today,” said Chris Taylor, CEO of Ode, the $1.5 billion joint venture between Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and other investment firms that is focused on implementing AI inside big companies.
Corporate use of cutting-edge models has fallen in recent weeks, according to data from Ramp, as companies realize most of their challenges — onboarding customers, iterating prototype tweaks — can be accomplished with older AI models that cost less (and don’t carry civilization-ending risks). Even Microsoft last month switched many employees to less-powerful models.
“As the capabilities improve, it does unlock more, but the amount of possibility that already exists with yesterday’s models is staggering,” Taylor told Semafor. “I don’t see anything slowing down AI adoption for them.”