CAMBRIDGE, September 16 — A group of technology leaders and researchers signed an open letter calling for a pause on the development of advanced artificial intelligence systems, citing growing fears about the risks the technology poses to society. The letter, published by the Future of Life Institute, urged AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, the large language model released by OpenAI in March 2023.
Among the signatories were Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX; Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple; and Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and a Turing Award winner for his work on deep learning. The signatories included more than 1,000 people at the time of publication, among them researchers, engineers, and executives from across the technology industry.
What the letter asked for
The letter warned that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence could pose profound risks to society and humanity. It called for the pause to be public, verifiable, and to include all key actors. It also asked governments to step in and institute a moratorium if such a pause could not be enacted quickly.
The signatories framed the pause as a way to develop shared safety protocols, rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. The letter acknowledged that the call was not a call to halt all AI development, but to step back from an out-of-control race to deploy ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.
Who signed and why it landed
The letter’s signatories included prominent figures such as Stuart Russell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of a leading AI textbook; and Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of the Future of Life Institute. The letter was open for additional signatures at the time of its release. The Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has previously worked on issues related to existential risk and AI safety.
The letter came amid a broader public debate about the rapid advancement of generative AI tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched in November 2022, and similar systems from Google, Microsoft, and other companies. Concerns raised by the signatories included the spread of misinformation, the potential for job displacement, and the loss of human control over autonomous systems.
The letter also referenced the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of guidelines developed at a 2017 conference, which stated that the goal of AI research should be to create beneficial intelligence, not undirected intelligence.
Support and pushback
The call for a pause was met with both support and criticism. Some AI researchers argued that a pause would be impractical and could cede leadership to less safety-conscious actors. Others said it was a necessary first step to allow for the development of governance frameworks.
The event marked a significant moment in the ongoing conversation about AI safety and the responsibilities of those developing the technology.
