Max Tegmark (born 1967 in Stockholm, Sweden) is a physicist, cosmologist, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology known for research on the multiverse and the mathematical structures underlying physical reality. Since the mid-2010s he has become one of the most visible public figures campaigning for caution in the development of Artificial general intelligence, primarily through the nonprofit he co-founded and now leads, the Future of Life Institute (FLI).
Tegmark co-founded FLI in 2014 with several colleagues, including Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, to fund and coordinate work on reducing risks from transformative technologies, with a strong early focus on Existential risk from AI. In 2017 the institute organized the Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI, producing a widely cited set of principles for responsible AI development signed by hundreds of researchers. FLI has since become one of the best-funded advocacy organizations focused specifically on AI safety and governance.
Life 3.0 and public advocacy
In 2017 Tegmark published "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," a book that lays out a range of scenarios for how transformative AI could unfold, from beneficial outcomes to catastrophic ones, and popularized a framework describing "Life 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0" as stages of biological, cultural, and technological evolution of intelligence. The book became a widely cited reference point in public discussion of Superintelligence and helped introduce concepts from AI safety research to a broad general readership.
Tegmark's highest-profile advocacy moment came in March 2023, when FLI published the open letter "Pause Giant AI Experiments," known as the Pause Giant AI Experiments letter, calling on AI labs to halt training of models more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. The letter, which Tegmark helped organize and publicize, was signed by thousands of researchers and technologists, including Elon Musk and other prominent figures, and generated significant mainstream media coverage of AI risk, though the pause it requested never occurred. He has since continued to push for binding international governance, engaging with initiatives such as the EU AI Act and the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park process.
Positions and reception
Tegmark generally frames AI risk in terms of concrete, near-term governance failures as well as longer-term catastrophic scenarios, positioning himself between the more categorical predictions of researchers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and mainstream industry voices favoring lighter-touch regulation. Critics have argued that FLI's campaigns sometimes conflate speculative long-term risks with more immediate harms such as bias and misinformation, diluting focus on either. Supporters credit Tegmark with translating technical alignment concerns into language that reached policymakers and the general public earlier and more effectively than most academic AI safety work.