# Pause Giant AI Experiments **Entity class:** Open letter **Publisher:** [[wiki/Future of Life Institute|Future of Life Institute]] **Publication date:** 22 March 2023 ## Definition *Pause Giant AI Experiments* is an open letter that asks whether society should develop nonhuman minds that could outnumber or outsmart humans and whether it should risk losing control of civilization. It calls for a temporary, public pause in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 while safety protocols are developed. The questions in the letter are advocacy and risk framing, not empirical claims that these outcomes have occurred. ## Relationships - **Publication:** [[wiki/Future of Life Institute|Future of Life Institute]] published the letter. - **Question posed:** [[wiki/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] is one possible future interrogated in the text; [[wiki/AI Safety|AI Safety]] is the policy and technical domain of its proposed response. - **Corpus routes:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] and [[articles/AI Escape Is the Wrong Metaphor|AI Escape Is the Wrong Metaphor]] offer related but distinct treatments of machine development. - **Primary source:** [Full open letter](https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/). ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts The 2023 open letter asks these as public-choice questions; it does not establish that succession has occurred. > "Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?" > **— Future of Life Institute open letter**, *2023, “Pause Giant AI Experiments”* [[reminders/Risk Debate/Should Humanity Build Minds That Outnumber Us by Future of Life Institute|Should Humanity Build Minds That Outnumber Us by Future of Life Institute]]