No one wants a slowdown. It's just a load of nonsense. It's something for the media to focus on, and it has no real impact. Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else. People naively believe that this is even a serious issue.

I think the AI companies want a slowdown because they can't keep increasing the rate of improvements - or the amount of hardware it requires can't be built fast enough.

Of course, while they may be competing against each other, they're also competing with international competitors. China especially has or may have the capacity to scale up compute a lot faster once they get enough chip manufacturing power. They're likely preparing for it, and once they're ready they will take over real fast, like they did with solar and EVs.

>Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else.

This might be scarily true. But we end up in the same problem, which is the fear of most people being wiped up.

Does it matter if the AI is doing it on its own or at the wishes of a small group of powerful people? For all intents and purposes they are both the same thing in the end, for most people anyway.