Future of Life Institute

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit founded in 2014 by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and colleagues to reduce existential risks from powerful technologies — above all, artificial intelligence. For its first decade it worked mostly through conferences (including the Asilomar meeting that produced the 2017 Asilomar AI Principles), research grants, and policy advocacy, with early funding from Elon Musk.

The pause letter

On March 22, 2023 — four months after ChatGPT launched and days after GPT-4 — FLI published “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” calling on all labs to halt training of systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months and, failing that, for governments to impose a moratorium. It drew over 30,000 signatures, including Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Yuval Noah Harari, and instantly mainstreamed the question of whether frontier AI development should slow down. Signatories disagreed about why they signed — some feared extinction, others near-term harms like propaganda — and critics, including many AI ethicists, argued the letter’s sci-fi framing distracted from present-day damage.

No lab paused. But the letter reshaped the landscape: within months, AI risk was on the agenda of the White House, the U.N., and the first global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. FLI has since pushed for binding regulation — it was an influential (and industry-resented) advocate for the EU AI Act and California safety legislation — and continues to grade frontier labs on safety, giving no lab better than mediocre marks.