It is vanishingly unlikely that all other major AI companies would agree to do so without the US government telling them to; this statement would be helpful, but only to communicate their position and not because of the commitment itself. Why not ask them to ask the government to stop everyone (maybe conditional on China agreeing to stop everyone in China)?
This seems to be exactly the point of the demand? This is a demand that would be cheap (perhaps even of negative cost) for DeepMind to accept (because the other AI companies wouldn’t agree to that), and would also be a major publicity win for the Pause AI crowd. Even counting myself skeptical of the hunger strikes, I think this is a very smart move.
the demand is that a specific company agrees to halt if everyone halts; this does not help in reality, because in fact it won’t be the case that everyone halts (abscent gov intervention).
This seems to be exactly the point of the demand? This is a demand that would be cheap (perhaps even of negative cost) for DeepMind to accept (because the other AI companies wouldn’t agree to that), and would also be a major publicity win for the Pause AI crowd. Even counting myself skeptical of the hunger strikes, I think this is a very smart move.
the demand is that a specific company agrees to halt if everyone halts; this does not help in reality, because in fact it won’t be the case that everyone halts (abscent gov intervention).
I don’t think the point of hunger strikes is to achieve immediate material goals, but publicity/symbolic ones.