[3] FLI was founded in March 2014 by MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, DeepMind research scientist Viktoriya Krakovna, Tufts University postdoctoral scholar Meia Chita-Tegmark, and UCSC physicist Anthony Aguirre.

The Institute's advisors include computer scientists Stuart J. Russell and Francesca Rossi, biologist George Church, cosmologist Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist Sandra Faber, theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, entrepreneur Elon Musk, and actors and science communicators Alan Alda and Morgan Freeman (as well as cosmologist Stephen Hawking prior to his death in 2018).

This called on major AI developers to agree on a verifiable six-month pause of any systems "more powerful than GPT-4" and to use that time to institute a framework for ensuring safety; or, failing that, for governments to step in with a moratorium.

The letter said: "recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no-one - not even their creators - can understand, predict, or reliably control".

[12][13] Prominent signatories of the letter included Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Evan Sharp, Chris Larsen, and Gary Marcus; AI lab CEOs Connor Leahy and Emad Mostaque; politician Andrew Yang; deep-learning researcher Yoshua Bengio; and Yuval Noah Harari.

[21] Mitchell said that “by treating a lot of questionable ideas as a given, the letter asserts a set of priorities and a narrative on AI that benefits the supporters of FLI.

[22] In Europe, FLI successfully advocated for the inclusion of more general AI systems, such as GPT-4, in the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act.

[32][33] The panelists were synthetic biologist George Church, geneticist Ting Wu, economist Andrew McAfee, physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn.