>Another piece of evidence on the pile that the sudden panic and desire to "slow down" is because they're hitting the plateau on capability

I think it's more a token-cost-demand plateau. They've reached the scale and investor trillions to which they can't 10x the hardware cost of inference any more. They can't afford to compete by eating costs and there isn't appetite for more expensive inference.

So in order that they don't bankrupt each other they're looking for the legal cartel behavior coordinating a stop to growth by convincing governments to regulate them into stopping.

There's a lot of juice to squeeze in efficiency but only so much whereas it seemed like capability was going to continue to scale with parameter count.

Maybe it's good news for everyone that model capability is now going to scale on semiconductor cost meaning huge players are going to be very motivated to make semiconductors cheap.