Getting into PauseAI w/ Will Petillo

Jun 23, 2025·
Into AI Safety
Into AI Safety
· 3 min read
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.
INTERVIEW RECORDED 2025.05.22; ASIDES RECORDED 2025.06.11; TRANSCRIPT

Chapters

00:00:00 ❙ Intro
00:03:36 ❙ What is PauseAI
00:10:10 ❙ Will Petillo's journey into AI safety advocacy
00:21:13 ❙ Understanding PauseAI
00:31:35 ❙ Pursuing a pause
00:40:06 ❙ Balancing advocacy in a complex world
00:45:54 ❙ Why a pause on frontier models?
00:54:48 ❙ Diverse perspectives within PauseAI
00:59:55 ❙ 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
  • Into AI Safety episode with Dr. Igor Krawczuk
  • muckrAIkers episode on SB1047

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

  • LegiScan page on SB1047
  • NY State Senate page on the RAISE Act
  • Congress page on the TAKE IT DOWN Act

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
  • 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?
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