Running PauseAI UK and doing my PhD in AI Safety at Oxford University.
Joseph Miller
Karma: 813
Thanks so much for writing this Michelle and for speaking with Anneliese Dodds!
If people want to get involved with PauseAI UK, they can sign up our website here, or subscribe to our events calendar.
Thanks! I’m happy with the traction we’ve got with politicians.
Yes we need to raise enough funding to be self-sustaining at around £100k/year starting at the end of this month.
Since that post went up, we’ve raised about £5k from generous individuals.
If you’re still fundraising I’d recommend a short comment in here.
Posted an updated there 🙏
PauseAI UK
Announcements:
In the past year PauseAI UK has delivered two conferences, written an open letter signed by 63 UK politicians, arranged a conference in the European Parliament, and co-organised the largest AI protest in the world. We now have a strong team, with Matilda da Rui joining as Deputy Director and several highly dedicated volunteers taking on substantial responsibility and launching their own local groups around the UK.
The total cost for all of PauseAI UK’s staff and activities is currently around £100k per year. To date, PauseAI Global has paid all of PauseAI UK’s staff costs and other expenses. However, PauseAI is adopting a federated model in which national chapters operate as distinct legal entities and raise funding independently. Global is able to fund PauseAI UK until the end of Q2 2026. At the time of writing we have no runway beyond this and we are actively seeking funding to help us stay afloat.
To see a detailed breakdown of our expenses and projected costs, take a look at our our Donor Prospectus. You can donate to PauseAI UK by visiting our donation page.
The next PauseAI UK protest will be (AFAIK) the first coalition protest between different AI activist groups, the main other group being Pull the Plug, a new organisation focused primarily on current AI harms. It will almost certainly be the largest protest focused exclusively on AI to date.
In my experience, the vast majority of people in AI safety are in favor of big-tent coalition protests on AI in theory. But when faced with the reality of working with other groups who don’t emphasize existential risk, they have misgivings. So I’m curious what people here will think of this.
Personally I’m excited about the protest and I’ve found the organizers of Pull the Plug to be very sincere and good to work with, but I’ve also set things up so that the brands of PauseAI UK and Pull the Plug remain clearly distinct so that our messaging remains clearly focused on the risks of future AI. For example, we have a separate signup page and we have our own demands focused on decelerating frontier development.
Net negative
None / Negligible
Net positive
Poll: What effect have protests calling for a pause / stop / deceleration on the development of AI had on the world?
a) Net positive
b) None / Negligible
c) Net negativeThis poll will be used to resolve this prediction market.
Vote by agree reacting to one of my comments below. Only vote once!
FWIW I have personally said something close to “If I donate enough money to effective animal charities, I’ll save more animals than I would by going vegan. So, I don’t need to personally stop consuming animal products.”
And after reading this article, I still stand by that position.
See ai-plans.com
Announcing PauseCon, the PauseAI conference.
Three days of workshops, panels, and discussions, culminating in our biggest protest to date.
Twitter: https://x.com/PauseAI/status/1915773746725474581
Apply now: https://pausecon.org
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This is cool, but the 10% Pledge is for life. If you’re primarily motivated by current events you may find it difficult to stick to your pledge 10 years from now.
</negativity>This is really great! Giving to charity is awesome and it’s especially impactful right now!
The next international PauseAI protest is taking place in one week in London, New York, Stockholm (Sunday 9th Feb), Paris (Mon 10 Feb) and many other cities around the world.
We are calling for AI Safety to be the focus of the upcoming Paris AI Action Summit. If you’re on the fence, take a look at Why I’m doing PauseAI.
Great point! Off the cuff I don’t think this massively changes considerations for PauseAI, but I’ll need to think about this.
Yep, maybe. I’m responding specifically to the vibe that this particular pre-print should make us more scared about AI.
As a technical person: AI is scary but this paper in particular is a nothing-burger. See my other comments.
No, there is no interesting new method here, it’s using LLM scaffolding to copy some files and run a script. It can only duplicate itself within the machine it has been given access to.
In order for AI to spread like a virus it would have to have some way to access new sources of compute, for which it would need be able to get money or the ability to hack into other servers. Neither of which current LLMs appear to be capable of.
Successful self-replication under no human assistance is the essential step for
AI to outsmart the human beingsThis seems clearly false. Replication (under their operationalization) is just another programming task that is not especially difficult. There’s no clear link between this task and self improvement, which would be a much harder ML task requiring very different types of knowledge and actions.
However, I do separately think we have passed the level of capabilities where it is responsible to keep improving AIs.
I’m confused why the comments aren’t more about cause prioritization as that’s the primary choice here. Maybe that’s too big of a discussion for this comment section.
The closest thing we have to that right now is to join the WhatsApp community. If you aren’t in any of the chats, then you will just get occasional announcements in the announcements channel.