In 2015 the Future of Life Institute (FLI) published an open letter titled “Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence,” released around its Puerto Rico conference on the future of AI. It was among the first coordinated public statements in which a broad cross-section of AI researchers acknowledged both the promise and the risks of advancing AI, and called for research aimed at ensuring AI systems do what their designers intend.
The letter’s argument was deliberately measured. It noted that everything civilization offers is a product of human intelligence, and that the potential benefits of AI are enormous, but that capturing those benefits while avoiding pitfalls requires deliberate research. Accompanying the letter was a detailed document outlining research directions spanning economics, law, computer security, and the technical problem of building systems that are verifiably aligned with human goals.
The letter drew an unusually wide range of signatories, eventually numbering in the thousands. They included leading AI researchers such as Stuart Russell, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Demis Hassabis, alongside prominent figures from outside the field such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak. FLI announced a research grant program, funded in part by Musk, to support work on the priorities the letter described.
The 2015 letter set a template that FLI would reuse: it was followed by the Asilomar AI Principles in 2017 and, more controversially, the 2023 letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments. The 2016 paper “Concrete Problems in AI Safety” can be seen as one technical answer to the research agenda this letter called for.