Into AI Safety Getting Into PauseAI w/ Will Petillo
Jun 23, 2025
01:48:04
Will Petillo, onboarding team lead at PauseAI, joins me to discuss the grassroots movement advocating for a pause on frontier AI model development. We explore PauseAI's strategy, talk about common misconceptions Will hears, and dig into how diverse perspectives still converge on the need to slow down AI development.
Will's Links
- Personal blog on AI
- His mindmap of the AI x-risk debate
- Game demos
- AI focused YouTube channel
- (00:00) - Intro
- (03:36) - What is PauseAI
- (10:10) - Will Petillo's journey into AI safety advocacy
- (21:13) - Understanding PauseAI
- (31:35) - Pursuing a pause
- (40:06) - Balancing advocacy in a complex world
- (45:54) - Why a pause on frontier models?
- (54:48) - Diverse perspectives within PauseAI
- (59:55) - PauseAI misconceptions
- (01:16:40) - Ongoing AI governance efforts (SB1047)
- (01:28:52) - The role of incremental progress
- (01:35:16) - Safety-washing and corporate responsibility
- (01:37:23) - Lessons from environmentalism
- (01:41:59) - Will's superlatives
Links
Related Kairos.fm Episodes
Exclusionary Tendencies
- Jacobin article - Elite Universities Gave Us Effective Altruism, the Dumbest Idea of the Century
- SSIR article - The Elitist Philanthropy of So-Called Effective Altruism
- Persuasion blogpost - The Problem with Effective Altruism
- Dark Markets blogpost - What's So Bad About Rationalism?
- FEE blogpost - What’s Wrong With the Rationality Community?
AI in Warfare
- Master's Thesis - The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Computer Systems in the Army
- International Journal of Intelligent Systems article - Artificial Intelligence in the Military: An Overview of the Capabilities, Applications, and Challenges
- Preprint - Basic Research, Lethal Effects: Military AI Research Funding as Enlistment
- AOAV Article - ‘Military Age Males’ in US Drone Strikes
- The Conversation article - Gaza war: Israel using AI to identify human targets raising fears that innocents are being caught in the net
- 972 article - ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
- IDF press release - The IDF's Use of Data Technologies in Intelligence Processing
- Lieber Institute West Point article - Israel–Hamas 2024 Symposium
- Verfassungsblog article - Gaza, Artificial Intelligence, and Kill Lists
- RAND research report - Dr. Li Bicheng, or How China Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Social Media Manipulation
- The Intercept article collection - The Drone Papers
- AFIT faculty publication - On Large Language Models in National Security Applications
- Nature article - Death by Metadata: The Bioinformationalisation of Life and the Transliteration of Algorithms to Flesh
Legislation
The Gavernor
- FastCompany article - Big Tech may be focusing its lobbying push on the California AI safety bill’s last stop: Gavin Newsom
- POLITICO article - How California politics killed a nationally important AI bill
- Newsom's veto message
- Additional relevant lobbying documentation - [1], [2]
- Jacobin article - With Newsom’s Veto, Big Tech Beats Democracy
Misc. Links
- FLI Open Letter on an AI pause
- Wikipedia article - Overton window
- Daniel Smachtenburger YouTube video - An Introduction to the Metacrisis
- VAISU website (looks broken as of 2025.06.19)
- AI Impacts report - Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?