The things that can slow it down are already in motion but they can only push it down so far.

(1) A recession causing a drain on the companies trying to build AI. A recession is here.

(2) A war or other critical event causing interest rates to go high, leading to defaults in startups and even established companies. Interest rate will go all the way to 6% this year.

(3) Hardware/cost limits being hit. Better hardware will ofcourse be available soon but it's harder now to just scale by pumping money. It's already reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, more is only possible by governments or high return rate on these AI models.

(4) Isolation of a large country like China from chip manufacturing and procuring for AI.

Other things that could happen

(*) GPT-4 being a bust and thereby eroding confidence.

(*) OpenAI and other companies fail to monetize.

(*) Scaling may have reached it's limits. Newer architectures take time.

But even with all this, it can only slow it down by 5-10 years. We will still likely have AGI in 2030s.