My first reaction - why slow down AI development and not just speed up the "integrate into us" development?

My second reaction - we already did. What you're seeing is the "slowed down" version of AI development. There are very many factors that have reduced AI development rate from its theoretical maximum. One of the big ones was risk aversion - AI investment, for a long time, came only from entities willing to dump a lot of time-money-effort into something with uncertain "payoff".

My third reaction - we also already did integrate with AI. Integration just sometimes looks different than what you're expecting.

My search engine, my email, etc. are already functionally a part of my consciousness. I don't need a physical wire-to-meat link for that. And I'm not just talking metaphorically; we have research that suggests that the human brain adapts to treat available information tools as part of its processing systems. AI systems that are similarly useful will be / are integrated in the same way.