PauseAI
PauseAI is an activist movement calling for an international pause on the training of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems. It was founded in Utrecht in May 2023 by the Dutch software entrepreneur Joep Meindertsma.[1] The group proposes to "implement a temporary pause on the training of the most powerful general AI systems" until it is known how to build them safely and keep them under democratic control, overseen by an international agency modeled on the International Atomic Energy Agency.[2]
Background
PauseAI followed the Future of Life Institute's open letter "Pause Giant AI Experiments", published in March 2023, which called on "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4". Signers included Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell. Eliezer Yudkowsky argued that the letter did not go far enough.[3]
Protests
PauseAI's first action, in May 2023, was outside Microsoft's lobbying office in Brussels. It has since protested outside the 2023 AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, at OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco in February 2024, and at Google DeepMind in London.[4] In May 2024, it coordinated protests across thirteen countries.[5]
Criticism
Critics of a pause argue that it would be unenforceable, would hand the lead to less cautious developers, and overstates speculative risks. Accelerationists and advocates of open-source AI argue that concentrating control of AI in regulators and a few labs poses greater dangers than continued development.
See also
- Existential Risk
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Effective Altruism
- Effective Accelerationism
- Butlerian Jihad
- Sam Altman
- Dario Amodei
References
- ↑ "About". PauseAI. Retrieved November 12, 2026.
- ↑ "Proposal". PauseAI. Retrieved November 12, 2026.
- ↑ Eliezer Yudkowsky (March 29, 2023). "Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down". Time. Retrieved November 12, 2026.
- ↑ Nuñez, Michael (February 12, 2024). "Protesters gather outside OpenAI office, opposing military AI and AGI". VentureBeat. Retrieved November 12, 2026.
- ↑ Gordon, Anna (May 13, 2024). "Protesters Are Fighting to Stop AI". Time. Retrieved November 12, 2026.