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'Pause Giant AI Experiments'

An open letter signed by Musk, Wozniak, Bengio and 30,000 others calls for a six-month halt to training systems beyond GPT-4; nobody pauses, and everyone talks about it.

category
culture
significance
2 of 5
people
Yoshua Bengio, Elon Musk, Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell
organisations
Future of Life Institute

what had to happen · 52 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 11

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1950Computing machinery and intelligence
  5. 1958The perceptron learns
  6. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  7. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  8. 1965Moore's law
  9. 1966ELIZA
  10. 1969Perceptrons
  11. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 9

  1. 1997Long short-term memory
  2. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  3. 1999The first GPU
  4. 2003A neural probabilistic language model
  5. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  6. 2007CUDA
  7. 2009Deep learning moves to GPUs
  8. 2009ImageNet
  9. 2010Rectified linear units

IV · Deep learning · 9

  1. 2012Google Brain's network discovers cats
  2. 2012Dropout
  3. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  4. 2013Deep Q-networks play Atari
  5. 2014Superintelligence
  6. 2014Attention
  7. 2014Sequence to sequence learning
  8. 2015Batch normalisation
  9. 2015Residual networks

V · Transformers · 8

  1. 2017The Asilomar AI Principlesdirect
  2. 2017Attention is all you need
  3. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
  4. 2018GPT: generative pre-training
  5. 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
  6. 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
  7. 2020GPT-3
  8. 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback

VI · Everyone · 3

  1. 2022InstructGPT
  2. 2022ChatGPT
  3. 2023GPT-4direct

Eight days after GPT-4, the Future of Life Institute published a letter asking all laboratories to pause, for at least six months, the training of any system more powerful than it. "Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?" it asked, and proposed that the pause be used to build shared safety protocols audited by outside experts. Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and the historian Yuval Noah Harari signed; by the summer the count passed 33,000.

No laboratory paused, and several signatories said they had not expected any to. Musk announced his own laboratory, xAI, in July. The letter's real effect was on the conversation: it put the words "existential risk" into every newsroom, it was followed in May by a one-sentence statement from the Center for AI Safety, signed by the heads of OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic, that the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, and it framed the hearings, summits and executive orders of the rest of the year.

Critics, including the authors of the stochastic-parrots paper, argued that the letter's science-fiction framing distracted from harms already happening. That argument, between long-term and present risk, organised the safety debate for the next two years.

what it led to · 7 events downstream, through 2026

Built on it directly:

  1. 2023The US executive order on AIVI
  2. 2023The Bletchley DeclarationVI

And, through them, by era:

VI · Everyone · 1
  1. 2024The EU AI Act enters into force
VII · Agents · 4
  1. 2025America's AI Action Plan
  2. 2026Claude Fable 5 and the Mythos class
  3. 2026The EU delays its high-risk AI rules
  4. 2026Claude Fable 5.1

sources · 1

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