Power, violence, security, liberty
I regret to inform you that our universe might be vulnerable in the Bostromian sense. It’s possible that the current world has degrees of freedom that we can’t coordinate on controlling quickly enough while also having a continuation of the norms of the governance and liberty that are sufficient for the truth of our world, other than a panopticon. Note that in such worlds power accumulation is a slippery slope. A lot of these worlds probably end up sucking for most people. It would be nice if it weren't true, but it might be true.
An AI lab coordinated pause or slowdown of AI production seems more likely than it was in 2023. Lots of tradeoffs here but I think the arguable value of a pause is slightly greater today than it was in 2023. The argument that it will be squandered is harder to make when we have automated research, which we don’t quite have yet (we have automated engineering). For what it’s worth I’m not personally in favor of a pause at this time, mostly because it breaks too many other parts of the tight rope walk through the singularity, the tech tree might have dragons, and adversaries are real.