The San Francisco Chronicle reported on yesterday’s “Stop the AI Race” march. Roughly two hundred people walked past the San Francisco offices of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, demanding that each company commit to stop training frontier models if the others make the same commitment.
This is a good protest demand. It would cost the companies little to agree to it, and it would be a way for them to reaffirm concerns their leaders have all, at different times, voiced about the extreme dangers of developing artificial superintelligence under competitive racing conditions.
A commitment by the top AI companies would not be enough to halt the race — that would require coordinated international action to prevent anyone anywhere from pursuing superintelligence — but it would send a strong signal that could spur said coordination. I think the U.S. government would be keen to avoid a situation where other countries continued towards the brink while American companies showed more sense.
The lead organizer of yesterday’s protest, Michaël Trazzi, had participated in a hunger strike outside Google DeepMind’s London office last year, with the same demand for a conditional commitment to stop racing. In the months that followed, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis essentially agreed. Asked in a January interview whether he’d be willing to pause if others would do the same, Hassabis said, “I think so,” and reiterated his longtime dream that researchers would carefully work on this together once AI was far enough along.
AI StopWatch has additional coverage of yesterday’s protest planned, from first-hand accounts of those who participated. The vibes, I am told, were amazing.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.