On 22 March 2023 the Future of Life Institute published an open letter titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments.” Its core demand is stated in the opening sentence: “We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” The letter argued that systems with human-competitive intelligence could pose profound risks to society and that their development was outpacing the ability to understand and govern them.
The letter proposed that the pause be public and verifiable, and that if labs would not act voluntarily, governments should step in. It also called for the time to be used to develop shared safety protocols, independent oversight, and governance structures for advanced AI. The release came just days after OpenAI’s GPT-4 launch, during a period of intense public attention on large language models.
The letter drew an unusually large and varied set of signatories, including the entrepreneur Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, alongside many academics and AI researchers. The Future of Life Institute’s own page recorded tens of thousands of signatures. No moratorium followed, but the letter marked the point at which calls to slow frontier AI development became a mainstream public debate rather than a niche concern.