Future of Life Institute letter calls for a six-month pause

The Future of Life Institute published “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter” on 22 March 2023, asking every laboratory to stop training systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. It gathered more than 30,000 signatures.

Why it mattered No laboratory paused. The letter did carry the argument about AI risk into ordinary political discussion months before governments held their first summits on the subject.