Max Tegmark

Swedish-American physicist at MIT, co-founder (2014) and president of the Future of Life InstituteFuture of Life Institute, prop. n.: An advocacy group that warns about the dangers of advanced AI and other powerful technologies, funds research and lobbies governments. It organized the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments. (FLI). Known in cosmology for analyses of the cosmic microwave background and for the mathematical universe hypothesis, he turned in the 2010s to the risks and benefits of AI. FLI convened the 2015 Puerto Rico conference, whose open letter called for research on robust and beneficial AI and was followed by grants funded by Elon MuskElon Musk, prop. n.: A South African-born American entrepreneur who runs Tesla and SpaceX, co-founded OpenAI, founded the AI company xAI, and has long warned that AI could endanger humanity., and the 2017 meeting that produced the Asilomar AI PrinciplesAsilomar AI Principles, prop. n.: A list of 23 guidelines for safe and beneficial AI drawn up at a 2017 conference in California and signed by thousands of researchers and public figures.; in March 2023 it published the 'Pause Giant AI ExperimentsPause Giant AI Experiments, prop. n.: A 2023 open letter, signed by tens of thousands of people including prominent technologists, that asked AI labs to halt the training of any AI more capable than GPT-4 for at least half a year.' letter, and in October 2025 the Statement on SuperintelligenceStatement on Superintelligence, prop. n.: A 2025 public statement, signed by scientists, celebrities and politicians, calling for a ban on building superintelligent AI until it is shown to be safe and the public supports it., which asks that work toward superintelligencesuperintelligence, n.: A mind, usually imagined as an AI, that would leave even the cleverest people far behind in nearly every kind of thinking, not just in one game or skill. None is known to exist. be prohibited until scientists broadly agree it can be made safe and controllable and the public strongly backs it. His book 'Life 3.0' (2017) surveyed possible AI futures. At MIT his group works on mechanistic interpretabilitymechanistic interpretability, n.: A branch of AI research that tries to reverse-engineer a neural network — working out, piece by piece, which internal parts represent which concepts and how they combine to produce behavior. and co-introduced Kolmogorov–Arnold networksKolmogorov–Arnold network, n.: A 2024 alternative to the standard neural network: instead of fixed rules inside neurons, every connection learns its own small curve, which can make the result easier to read as a formula. (2024).