2023 Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

2023 letter calling for a pause on AI system training. Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter is the title of a letter published by the Future of Life Institute in March 2023. The letter calls "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4", citing risks such as AI-generated propaganda, extreme automation of jobs, human obsolescence, and a society-wide loss of control. It received more than 30,000 signatures, including academic AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pause_Giant_AI_Experiments:_An_Open_Letter

• The publication occurred a week after the release of OpenAI's large language model GPT-4. It asserts that current large language models are "becoming human-competitive at general tasks", referencing a paper about early experiments of GPT-4, described as having "Sparks of AGI". AGI is described as posing numerous important risks, especially in a context of race-to-the-bottom dynamics in which some AI labs may be incentivized to overlook security to deploy products more quickly.
• It asks to refocus AI research on making powerful AI systems "more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned (AI alignment), trustworthy, and loyal". The letter also recommends more governmental regulation, independent audits before training AI systems, as well as "tracking highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability" and "robust public funding for technical AI safety research". FLI suggests using the "amount of computation that goes into a training run" as a proxy to for how powerful an AI is, and thus as a threshold.