Max Tegmark is a Swedish-American physicist and cosmologist, a Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and President of the Future of Life Institute. Outside physics he is one of the more prominent organisers of AI existential-risk advocacy, drawing on the convening capacity of the Future of Life Institute.
Background
Tegmark's physics work includes cosmic microwave background (CMB) analysis, inflationary cosmology, and the mathematical universe hypothesis. He is the author of Our Mathematical Universe (2014) and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017), the latter a popular-science book in AI-risk discourse.
He co-founded the Future of Life Institute (FLI) in 2014 with Jaan Tallinn, Viktoriya Krakovna, Anthony Aguirre, and Meia Chita-Tegmark.
Roles
Tegmark is President of FLI and a Professor of Physics at MIT. Under his leadership FLI runs grant programmes and policy advocacy, produced the Asilomar AI Principles (2017), and organised the 2023 Pause Letter.
He was the primary organiser of the 2017 Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI, which produced the Asilomar AI Principles. He was the lead organiser of the FLI Pause Giant AI Experiments open letter (March 2023), which called for a 6-month moratorium on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 and was signed by more than 30,000 people, including Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, and Elon Musk. He has also engaged in media and policy advocacy framing advanced AI as a civilisational-scale hazard.
Positions and statements
Tegmark argues that unaligned superintelligence is a plausible civilisational-scale threat and that current racing dynamics are irrational from a game-theoretic standpoint. He is distinctive among senior AI figures in pushing for an outright pause on frontier training runs until safety guarantees exist, diverging from the "regulate, don't pause" position associated with figures such as Dario Amodei. He has repeatedly characterised the US–China "AI race" as self-defeating rhetoric that he argues benefits labs at public expense. His position is publicly disputed by Yann LeCun, who disagrees on pause advocacy.
FLI's pause advocacy is more elite-facing and policy-focused, and is distinguished from PauseAI, the grassroots movement that partially grew out of it.
Selected works
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)
- Our Mathematical Universe (2014)
- Pause Giant AI Experiments open letter (March 2023)
- Asilomar AI Principles (2017)
Relationships
- leads: Future of Life Institute
- related: FLI — Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter — FLI's single most influential intervention
- related: PauseAI — adjacent grassroots movement
- supports: AI Autonomy Risk, Statement on AI Risk (CAIS)
- related: Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Geoffrey Hinton — fellow senior signatories
- contradicts: Yann LeCun — public disagreement on pause advocacy