Robert Wright, Which AI Titan should you root for? Non Zero Newsletter, Jan. 23,2026.
About halfway in:
In an appearance at Davos this week, Hassabis was asked by Emily Chang of Bloomberg to imagine that all the other big AI companies around the world were willing to “pause” the development of bigger AI models in order “to give regulation time to catch up, to give society time to adjust to some of these changes.” She asked, “Would you advocate for that?” His reply:
“I think so. I’ve been on record saying what I’d like to see happen. It was always my dream… that as we got close to this moment, this threshold moment of AGI arriving, we would maybe collaborate, you know, in a scientific way. I sometimes talk about setting up an international CERN equivalent for AI where all the best minds in the world would collaborate together and do the final steps in a very rigorous scientific way involving all of society, maybe philosophers and social scientists and economists, as well as technologists to kind of figure out what we want from this technology and how to utilize it in a way that benefits all of humanity. And I think that’s what’s at stake.”
Hassabis got an online ovation from AI Safety advocates for saying he’d be up for a pause if his competitors were game. But it’s actually a pretty easy thing to say, since no one envisions all the other players being game anytime soon. In fact, Hassabis himself added this about the prospect of an AI pause: “Unfortunately, it kind of needs international collaboration, because even if one company or even one nation or even the West decided to do that, it’s no use unless the whole world agrees, at least on some kind of minimum standards. And, you know, international cooperation is a little bit tricky at the moment. So that’s going to have to change if we want to have that kind of rigorous scientific approach to the final steps to AGI.”
Count me in. The sooner, the better. Here's their research program.
Google search on the string: I sometimes talk about setting up an international CERN equivalent for AI.
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