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Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter (FLI, 2023)
webCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Future of Life Institute
A landmark public advocacy document signed by prominent researchers and figures in 2023; represents a major moment in public AI governance debate, though critics questioned its enforceability and some signatories later distanced themselves from its framing.
Metadata
Importance: 72/100press releaseprimary source
Summary
A widely-signed open letter published by the Future of Life Institute in March 2023, calling on all AI labs to pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. It argues that AI development has entered a dangerous uncontrolled race and calls for shared safety protocols, independent auditing, and accelerated AI governance frameworks before proceeding with more powerful systems.
Key Points
- •Calls for an immediate 6-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, to be public, verifiable, and industry-wide.
- •Warns of risks including misinformation, mass unemployment, loss of human control, and development of minds that may outsmart or replace humanity.
- •Urges AI labs and independent experts to jointly develop rigorous, audited safety protocols during the pause.
- •Calls on governments to institute a moratorium if voluntary pause cannot be enacted, and to rapidly develop AI regulatory authorities.
- •Gathered over 33,000 signatures and became a major public flashpoint in debates about AI governance and development pace.
Cited by 8 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Should We Pause AI Development? | Crux | 47.0 |
| Mainstream Era | Historical | 42.0 |
| Future of Life Institute | Organization | 46.0 |
| Survival and Flourishing Fund | Organization | 59.0 |
| Elon Musk: Track Record | -- | 66.0 |
| Elon Musk | Person | 38.0 |
| Pause / Moratorium | Concept | 72.0 |
| Pause Advocacy | Approach | 91.0 |
1 FactBase fact citing this source
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[All Open Letters](https://futureoflife.org/?page_id=39741)
# Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
Signatures
33705
[Add your signature](https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/#signature)
Published
22 March, 2023
AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research\[1\] and acknowledged by top AI labs.\[2\] As stated in the widely-endorsed [Asilomar AI Principles](https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/ai-principles/), _Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources_. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs 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.
Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,\[3\] and we must ask ourselves: _Should_ we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? _Should_ we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? _Should_ we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? _Should_ we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. **Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.** This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects. OpenAI’s [recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence](https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond), states that _“At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.”_ We agree. That point is now.
Therefore, **we 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.
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 develo
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