Report from the march to Stop the AI Race

On Saturday, beneath a sparkling blue sky, I joined the march to Stop the AI Race. We gath­ered in front of OpenAI’s office in Mis­sion Bay, then walked through the city to Anthropic’s HQ beside the Transbay Transit Center.

If this had been a march orga­nized around the dif­fuse con­cept of “AI BAD”, I wouldn’t have joined. But I am just so impressed by the ele­gance of Stop the AI Race’s demand:

Every major AI lab CEO must pub­licly commit to pausing fron­tier model devel­op­ment if every other major lab in the world cred­ibly does the same.

Like, how rare is this?? A protest move­ment with (1) an actual objective, that (2) could con­ceiv­ably be met. As much as any­thing else, I came out in sup­port of sim­plicity and clarity.

But I also believe that the world would ben­efit from a pause in fron­tier model devel­op­ment. The weird thing about this debate is that no one, not even the most hyped-up accelerationist, dis­agrees about the situation:

1. Here is a powerful technology,
2. operating in a way that no one really understands,
3. with profound effects on the economy, not to mention human psychology,
4. that are very difficult, maybe impossible, to make plans around.

For my part, I look at that fact pat­tern and think: uh, yes, this merits great cau­tion and deliberation! Measured, I would say, in coun­tries and years, not “model cards” and weeks. And my response isn’t reflexive, but deep-rooted — I’ve been grap­pling with this tech­nology for ten years.

This isn’t a call to outlaw lan­guage models. It has been widely observed — Jack Clark makes this point all the time — that even if model devel­op­ment stopped immediately, the metab­o­liza­tion of what’s cur­rently avail­able would hap­pily occupy busi­nesses and researchers alike for decades. Decades! These things are growing and mutating faster than any­body can make sense of them. So … here’s a wild thought … let’s slow down, and make sense of them.

I’ll direct your atten­tion to the lan­guage of a recent post from the Anthropic Insti­tute. It’s weighed down by a few extra clauses, but the spirit of Stop the AI Race’s demand shines clearly through:

We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or tem­porarily pause fron­tier AI devel­op­ment to enable soci­etal struc­tures and align­ment research to keep up with the advance of the tech­nology. The Anthropic Insti­tute will con­duct research — in col­lab­o­ra­tion with many others — and take actions to help build the sys­tems that a cred­ible slow­down or pause would require. These sys­tems would enable fron­tier AI devel­opers to verify that others glob­ally have actu­ally stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the aus­pices of a coor­di­nated slow­down to jump ahead in secret. If such sys­tems existed, we expect that we would slow down or tem­porarily pause, if other devel­opers at or near the fron­tier also did so in a ver­i­fi­able manner.

Even if the danger isn’t as exis­ten­tial as the doomiest doomers imagine (I spotted these two in attendance) I believe this is a great oppor­tu­nity for humanity to prove that we can actu­ally make choices about the devel­op­ment and deploy­ment of pow­erful tech­nology. If we can’t, then we are not as sov­er­eign as we imagine; if we can’t, a machine god has already taken over this planet, and it’s called the market.

A pause isn’t impossible, and pow­erful, unpre­dictable AI is (a gor­geous blue banner at the head of the march declared) not inevitable.

This whole thing was better than I expected: a big crowd, num­bering in the low hundreds; a great vibe, goofy and polite; per­fect weather, never assured in San Fran­cisco in July; and a marching band! We love a marching band. (Who paid for the marching band … ?)

And, of course, it’s worth appreciating, here and now in this country’s 250th summer, that we can still do things like this. Raise a mild ruckus, take up a bit of space, walk in the middle of the street. As we marched past Oracle Park, there was a Giants game underway, and it occurred to me that the great majority of the fans inside agree with the argu­ment of this protest much more than they agree with the objec­tives of the AI companies. Democ­racy stirs — a leviathan to match the machine.

From the streets of San Fran­cisco — what a day!