The People Building AI Are the Ones Asking Us to Slow Down
In 2023, the CEOs of the world's most powerful AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind — and the scientists who built the field signed public statements warning that the technology they are creating could pose a risk of extinction. They did not have to say this. They chose to. This page presents their words and connects them to the five Voice Up principles and the Naming Gap Trilogy.
Watch All Three Videos
Watch all three videos below — two from the builders calling for a slowdown, and one from the builder who disagrees. Then work through the 7-Day Mini Sprint. When you finish all four, you unlock your entry into the $50 gift card raffle.
Geoffrey Hinton — "The Godfather of AI" (60 Minutes)
The pioneer who resigned from Google to warn the world about the technology he helped create.
Anthropic CEO Warns — Without Guardrails, AI Could Be on a Dangerous Path (60 Minutes)
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (the company Jack Clark cofounded), on why AI safety must be built before scale.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Fears About AI — Why He Disagrees with the Slowdown (CBS Sunday Morning)
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia — the company building the chips powering the AI revolution — talks with CBS News' Jo Ling Kent about the exponential growth of AI, the industry warnings about its power, and why he disagrees with recent calls to slow down development. The other side of the slowdown debate.
Why We Include the Counterpoint
Voice Up holds all five principles — including humility. Humility means hearing the other side, especially when the other side is the person building the hardware the whole field runs on. Jensen Huang disagrees with the slowdown. The 7-Day Sprint asks you to sit with both voices — the ones calling for caution and the one calling for speed — and find your own purpose in the tension between them.
AI Slowdown — Purpose in the Age of Caution
A 7-day mini sprint built from the AI CEO slowdown statements. Each day connects the calls for caution to the Voice Up principles and the Naming Gap Trilogy — the builders sounding the alarm, the pause, extinction risk, the godfather who quit, system responsibility, designing for safety, and your purpose in the slowdown. Complete all 7 days, then come back here to enter the raffle.
Watch All Three Videos + Finish the Sprint — Enter to Win $50
Any registered user who watches all three videos on this page — including Jensen Huang's counterpoint — AND completes the 7-Day AI Slowdown Mini Sprint is entered into a $50 gift card raffle. Do the real work. Reflect. Enter to win.
📋 Requirements to Enter
Complete all 5 requirements above to unlock your raffle entry.
○ Video 1 · ○ Video 2 · ○ Video 3 · ○ 7-Day Sprint · ○ Registered
The Key Statements
Pause Giant AI Experiments — An Open Letter
Over 30,000 signatories — including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell — called for a 6-month moratorium on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
"AI labs are in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful systems that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control."
✦ Voice Up Principle
Patience — We all need forgiveness. The letter asks for a pause — not a stop. Patience is the principle that says the fastest path is not always the right one.
Geoffrey Hinton Resigns from Google
The "Godfather of AI" quit his job at Google so he could speak freely about the risks of the artificial intelligence he helped create.
"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I had not done it, somebody else would have."
✦ Voice Up Principle
Humility — We all have much to learn. Hinton did not claim to have all the answers. He left a position of power to speak honestly. That is humility in action.
Statement on AI Risk
Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio signed a single 22-word statement.
"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
✦ Voice Up Principle
Precision — All the details matter. The statement is deliberately short. Precision in naming the risk is the first step to addressing it.
Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy
Dario Amodei's company — the one Jack Clark cofounded — published a policy committing to pause scaling if safety cannot be assured at each level.
"We are committed to a responsible scaling approach that pauses at each new capability level until safety can be demonstrated."
✦ Voice Up Principle
Collaboration — All are welcome. Safety is not one company's job. Anthropic published the policy openly so others could adopt it. Collaboration is how safety scales.
The Five Principles — Connected to the Slowdown
Collaboration
AI safety is a collaboration between technical and humanistic minds. No single company, discipline, or government builds safety alone. The open letters were collaborative acts — signed by competitors, by rivals, by people who disagree on almost everything except this.
Humility
The people building the most powerful AI are the ones saying they do not fully understand it. Hinton left Google to warn freely. Anthropic warns about its own technology. Humility is not weakness in the AI age — it is the posture that lets you keep learning when the ground shifts.
Precision
The extinction risk statement is 22 words. The pause letter names a specific threshold — systems more powerful than GPT-4. Precision in naming the risk is what makes it addressable. Vague warnings do not slow anything down. Precise ones can.
Patience
The call for a pause is a call for patience — not a call to stop. Patience says: the fastest path is not always the right one. A six-month pause to understand what we are building is not fear. It is the same patience that lets purpose sustain over the long arc.
Empathy
The extinction risk statement names the people who would be harmed — everyone. Empathy is what makes AI safety a human question, not just a technical one. The right questions about AI are always about people: who is helped, who is harmed, who is afraid, who is hoping.
Take the Next Step
The 7-day mini sprint turns these statements into a guided journey through the Voice Up principles and the Naming Gap Trilogy — from the builders sounding the alarm to your own purpose in the age of caution. Watch all three videos — including Jensen Huang's counterpoint — finish the sprint, and enter the $50 raffle.