The call for an AI pause points to a major concern

For some, the goal of Future of Life, which is dedicated to mitigating the risk of AI and other technologies, feels impossible to achieve. "It's a prisoner's dilemma," said Sarah Kreps, director of the Cornell Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, referring to the paradox in decision analysis in which two self-interested entities don't produce the best result. "There's no way to collectively get all of the different entities that are working on these language models to collectively pause." The letter is reminiscent of a call from former President Obama in 2009 to disarm to have a world without nuclear weapons, Kreps said. Obama pledged the United States would give up its nuclear weapons -- but only once everyone else had gotten rid of theirs.