Future of Life Institute

The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit organization founded in March 2014 by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, UC Santa Cruz physicist Anthony Aguirre, DeepMind research scientist Viktoriya Krakovna, and Tufts University researcher Meia Chita-Tegmark. Its mission is to steer transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks. FLI focuses on three primary technology domains: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nuclear weapons. The organization pursues its mission through four main activities: policy development and advocacy, grantmaking, research support, and public outreach and education. In its early years, FLI organized a landmark 2015 conference in Puerto Rico that brought together leading AI researchers to discuss beneficial AI development, and launched the world's first peer-reviewed grant program dedicated to AI safety research, initially funded by a $10 million donation from Elon Musk. In January 2017, FLI convened the Beneficial AI conference that produced the Asilomar AI Principles, one of the earliest and most influential sets of AI governance principles, now signed by over 1,200 AI researchers and 2,500 others. FLI has been active in nuclear risk reduction, mobilizing approximately 3,700 scientists across 100 countries, including 30 Nobel Laureates, in support of the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017. The organization also produced Slaughterbots, a short film about autonomous weapons that garnered over 100 million views and was screened at the United Nations. In March 2023, FLI published the open letter "Pause Giant AI Experiments," calling for a six-month moratorium on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. The letter attracted over 30,000 signatures, including from researchers and executives such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, and Elon Musk, and catalyzed a global debate on AI development governance. In 2021, FLI received a major cryptocurrency donation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, which has partly served as an endowment funding the organization's expanded operations. FLI launched a $25 million multi-year grant program addressing existential risks, and has continued to fund research through PhD fellowships, requests for proposals, and direct grants across AI safety, nuclear war research, and governance design. More recently, FLI launched its Futures program in January 2024, initiated the Campaign to Ban Deepfakes, published the AI Safety Index, and expanded its policy work with offices in Washington DC, Brussels, and London. The organization explicitly does not accept donations from Big Tech companies or from companies seeking to build artificial general intelligence, in order to maintain its independence. FLI's scientific advisory board has included prominent figures such as Stuart Russell, Francesca Rossi, George Church, Saul Perlmutter, Frank Wilczek, and the late Stephen Hawking.