The Future of Life Institute published an open letter titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments,” which calls on all organizations training AI more powerful than GPT-4 to pause for the next six months.

Signed by over 1,100 people, the letter has the support of notable figures such as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Yuval Noah Harari.

Musk has been outspokenly critical of OpenAI, and tweeted in February that “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.”

From the letter:

[W]e call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

The letter argues for the pause because “AI labs [are] locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.” The letter continues:

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

AI research and development should be refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.

Last month, a change.org petition called “Unplug The Evil AI Right Now” circulated in the wake of Microsoft’s release of the Bing chatbot.

The Future of Life Institute is a non-profit whose mission is to reduce the risk of nuclear war and improve AI governance. Prominent physicist Max Tegmark is its president, and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallin and Victoria Krakovna, a researcher at the Deep Mind Institute, are on its board. The Institute’s website lists Musk as an external advisor.

-Brandon Gorrell