We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs. As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar 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, 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, 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 development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.
AI research and development should be refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.
In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability; provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.
Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an "AI summer" in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt. Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do so here. Let's enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.
Signatories include Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Hariri, Andrew Yang, Connor Leahy (Conjecture), and Emad Mostaque (Stability).
It seems like there's a lot of negative comments about this letter. Even if it does not go through, it seems very net positive for the reason that it makes explicit an expert position against large language model development due to safety concerns. There's several major effects of this, as it enables scientists, lobbyists, politicians and journalists to refer to this petition to validate their potential work on the risks of AI, it provides a concrete action step towards limiting AGI development, and it incentivizes others to think in the same vein about concrete solutions.
I've tried to formulate a few responses to the criticisms raised:
"6 months isn't enough to develop the safety techniques they detail": Besides it being at least 6 months, the proposals seem relatively reasonable within something as farsighted as this letter. Shoot for the moon and you might hit the sky, but this time the sky is actually happening and work on many of their proposals is already underway. See e.g. EU AI Act, funding for AI research, concrete auditing work and safety evaluation on models. Several organizations are also working on certification and the scientific work towards watermarking is sort of done? There's also great arguments for ensuring this since right now, we are at the whim of OpenAI management on the safety front.
"It feels rushed": It might have benefitted from a few reformulations but it does seem alright?
"OpenAI needs to be at the forefront": Besides others clearly lagging behind already, what we need are insurances that these systems go well, not at the behest of one person. There's also a lot of trust in OpenAI management and however warranted that is, it is still a fully controlled monopoly on our future. If we don't ensure safety, this just seems too optimistic (see also differences between public interview for-profit sama and online sama).
"It has a negative impact on capabilities researchers": This seems to be an issue from <2020 and some European academia. If public figures like Yoshua cannot change the conversation, then who should? Should we just lean back and hope that they all sort of realize it by themselves? Additionally, the industry researchers from DM and OpenAI I've talked with generally seem to agree that alignment is very important, especially as their management is clearly taking the side of safety.
"The letter signatures are not validated properly": Yeah, this seems like a miss, though as long as the top 40 names are validated, the negative impacts should be relatively controlled.
All in good faith of course; it's a contentious issue but this letter seems generally positive to me.
Just repeating from my other comments: my main issue is the broad proposal of "let's get governments involved" that appears to not be aware of all the horrible and corrupt things governments do by-default when they get involved (cf. Covid), nor proposes any ways to avoid lots of dysfunction.
The top 40 names were definitely not validated at the time of posting. (or even now?)
Has anyone representing the organization stated on the record that the remaining signatories are legitimate?
Signatories include Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Hariri, Andrew Yang, Connor Leahy (Conjecture), and Emad Mostaque (Stability).
Edit: covered in NYT, BBC, WaPo, NBC, ABC, CNN, CBS, Time, etc. See also Eliezer's piece in Time.
Edit 2: see FLI's FAQ.
Edit 3: see FLI's report Policymaking in the Pause.
Edit 4: see AAAI's open letter.