The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a non-profit founded in May 2014 in the Boston area, with a launch event held at MIT. Its founders included MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, DeepMind research scientist Viktoriya Krakovna, Tufts scholar Meia Chita-Tegmark, and physicist Anthony Aguirre. The institute’s mission is to “steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life,” with work concentrated on artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nuclear weapons.
FLI became one of the most visible organizations in the AI safety field through a series of landmark convenings and campaigns. In January 2015 it hosted a conference in Puerto Rico bringing together AI builders with experts in economics, law, and ethics. Two years later, its January 2017 Asilomar conference produced the Asilomar AI Principles, among the earliest and most influential sets of AI governance principles.
In March 2023 FLI published the open letter “Pause Giant AI Experiments,” which called for a six-month halt on training runs more powerful than GPT-4 and ignited a global debate about the pace of AI development. The institute also runs grant programs and publishes an AI Safety Index rating the major labs.
Why business readers should care: FLI has repeatedly set the terms of public debate about AI risk, and its principles and open letters have shaped how policymakers, journalists, and the labs themselves talk about frontier AI safety.