More Than a Thousand Technologists Sign a Letter Calling for a Six-Month Pause on the Most Powerful AI

The open letter, published by the Future of Life Institute and signed by Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and many AI researchers, asks labs to stop training anything more powerful than GPT-4 until safety rules exist.

An open letter published this week asks every AI laboratory to "immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4," and asks governments to step in if they won't. As of this morning it has more than a thousand signatures, among them Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the historian Yuval Noah Harari, and a long list of researchers in the field, including several who helped invent it.

The letter's argument is that the labs are 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," and that the pause should be used to agree on safety standards and oversight. It asks the questions in plain language: "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 risk loss of control of our civilization?"

Nobody expects the labs to stop. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have not signed, and Sam Altman of OpenAI has said the letter is "missing most technical nuance." Several signatories have since said they don't agree with everything in it and signed to start a conversation. Critics on the other side argue that the letter's science-fiction framing — the "loss of control" language — distracts from harms that are happening now, like bias and misinformation.

What the letter has done is put the argument on the front page. Three weeks ago, the idea that AI might be moving too fast was a conversation inside the field. This morning it is a question that ordinary people are asking their coworkers.