Let's look at the two horns of the dilemma, as you put it:

• Why do many people who want to pause AI not support the organization "PauseAI"?
• Why would the organization "PauseAI" not change itself so that people who want to pause AI can support it?

Well, here are some reasons someone who wants pause AI might not want to support the organization PauseAI:

• When you visit the website for PauseAI, you might find some very steep proposals for Pausing AI -- such as requiring the "Granting [of] approval for new training runs of AI models above a certain size (e.g. 1 billion parameters)" or "Banning the publication of such algorithms" that improve AI performance or prohibiting the training of models that "are expected to exceed a score of 86% on the MMLU benchmark" unless their safety can be guaranteed. Implementing these measures would be really hard -- a one-billion parameter model is quite small (I could train one); banning the publication of information on this stuff would be considered by many an infringement on freedom of speech; and there are tons of models now that do better than 86% on the MMLU and have done no harm.

So, if you think the specific measures proposed by them would limit an AI that even many pessimists would think is totally ok and almost risk-free, then you might not want to push for these proposals but for more lenient proposals that, because they are more lenient, might actually get implemented. To stop asking for the sky and actually get something concrete.

• If you look at the kind of claims that PauseAI makes in their risks page, you might believe that some of them seem exaggerated, or that PauseAI is simply throwing all the negative things they can find about AI into big list to make it seem bad. If you think that credibility is important to the effort to pause AI, then PauseAI might seem very careless about truth in a way that could backfire.

So, this is why people who want to pause AI might not want to support PauseAI.

And, well, why wouldn't pause AI want to change?

Well -- I'm gonna speak broadly -- if you look at the history of PauseAI, they are marked by belief that the measures proposed by others are insufficient for Actually Stopping AI -- for instance the kind of policy measures proposed by people working at AI companies isn't enough; that the kind of measures proposed by people funded by OpenPhil are often not enough; and so on. Similarly, they often believe that people who are talking about these claims are nitpicking, and so on. (Citation needed.)

I don't think this dynamic is rare. Many movements have "radical wings," that more moderate organizations in the movement would characterize as having impracticable maximalist policy goals and careless epistemics. And the radical wings would of course criticize back that the "moderate wings" have insufficient or cowardly policy goals and epistemics optimized for respectability and not not truth. And the conflicts between them are intractable because people cannot move away from these prior beliefs about their interlocutors; in this respect the discourse around PauseAI seems unexceptionable and rather predictable.

I feel kind of silly about supporting PauseAI. Doing ML research, or writing long fancy policy reports feels high status. Public protests feel low status. I would rather not be seen publicly advocating for doing something low-status. I suspect a good number of other people feel the same way.

(I do in fact support PauseAI US, and I have defended it publicly because I think it's important to do so, but it makes me feel silly whenever I do.)

That's not the only reason why people don't endorse PauseAI, but I think it's an important reason that should be mentioned.

Personally, because I don't believe the policy in the organization's name is viable or helpful.

As to why I don't think it's viable, it would require the Trump-Vance administration to organise a strong global treaty to stop developing a technology that is currently the US's only clear economic lead over the rest of the world.

If you attempted a pause, I think it wouldn't work very well and it would rupture and leave the world in a worse place: Some AI research is already happening in a defence context. This is easy to ignore while defence isn't the frontier. The current apparent absence of frontier AI research in a military context is miraculous, strange, and fragile. If you pause in the private context (which is probably all anyone could do) defence AI will become the frontier in about three years, and after that I don't think any further pause is possible because it would require a treaty against secret military technology R&D. Military secrecy is pretty strong right now. Hundreds of billions yearly is known to be spent on mostly secret military R&D, probably more is actually spent.
(to be interested in a real pause, you have to be interested in secret military R&D. So I am interested in that, and my position right now is that it's got hands you can't imagine)

To put it another way, after thinking about what pausing would mean, it dawned on me that pausing means moving AI underground, and from what I can tell that would make it much harder to do safety research or to approach the development of AI with a humanitarian perspective. It seems to me like the movement has already ossified a slogan that makes no sense in light of the complex and profane reality that we live in, which is par for the course when it comes to protest activism movements.

I think the concept of Pausing AI just feels unrealistic at this point.

1. Previous AI safety pause efforts (GPT-2 release delay, 2023 Open Letter calling for a 6 month pause) have come to be seen as false alarms and overreactions
2. Both industry and government are now strongly committed to an AI arms race
3. A lot of the non-AI-Safety opponents of AI want a permanent stop/ban in the fields they care about, not a pause, so it lacks for allies
4. It's not clear that meaningful technical AI safety work on today's frontier AI models could have been done before they were invented; therefore a lot of technical AI safety researchers believe we still need to push capabilities further before a pause would truly be useful 

PauseAI could gain substantial support if there's a major AI-caused disaster, so it's good that some people are keeping the torch lit for that possibility, but supporting it now means burning political capital for little reason. We'd get enough credit for "being right all along" just by having pointed out the risks ahead of time, and we want to influence regulation/industry now, so we shouldn't make Pause demands that get you thrown out of the room. In an ideal world we'd spend more time understanding current models, though.

A. Many AI safety people don't support relatively responsible companies unilaterally pausing, which PauseAI advocates. (Many do support governments slowing AI progress, or preparing to do so at a critical point in the future. And many of those don't see that as tractable for them to work on.)

B. "Pausing AI" is indeed more popular than PauseAI, but it's not clearly possible to make a more popular version of PauseAI that actually does anything; any such organization will have strategy/priorities/asks/comms that alienate many of the people who think "yeah I support pausing AI."

C. 

There does not seem to be a legible path to prevent possible existential risks from AI without slowing down its current progress.

This seems confused. Obviously P(doom | no slowdown) < 1. Many people's work reduces risk in both slowdown and no-slowdown worlds, and it seems pretty clear to me that most of them shouldn't switch to working on increasing P(slowdown).

Some quick takes:

• "Pause AI" could refer to many different possible policies.
• I think that if humanity avoided building superintelligent AI, we'd massively reduce the risk of AI takeover and other catastrophic outcomes.
• I suspect that at some point in the future, AI companies will face a choice between proceeding more slowly with AI development than they're incentivized to, and proceeding more quickly while imposing huge risks. In particular, I suspect it's going to be very dangerous to develop ASI.
• I don't think that it would be clearly good to pause AI development now. This is mostly because I don't think that the models being developed literally right now pose existential risk.
• Maybe it would be better to pause AI development right now because this will improve the situation later (e.g. maybe we should pause until frontier labs implement good enough security that we can be sure their Slack won't be hacked again, leaking algorithmic secrets). But this is unclear and I don't think it immediately follows from "we could stop AI takeover risk by pausing AI development before the AIs are able to take over".
• Many of the plausible "pause now" actions seem to overall increase risk. For example, I think it would be bad for relatively responsible AI developers to unilaterally pause, and I think it would probably be bad for the US to unilaterally force all US AI developers to pause if they didn't simultaneously somehow slow down non-US development.
  • (They could slow down non-US development with actions like export controls.)
• Even in the cases where I support something like pausing, it's not clear that I want to spend effort on the margin actively supporting it; maybe there are other things I could push on instead that have better ROI.
• I'm not super enthusiastic about PauseAI the organization; they sometimes seem to not be very well-informed, they sometimes argue for conclusions that I think are wrong, and I find Holly pretty unpleasant to interact with, because she seems uninformed and prone to IMO unfair accusations that I'm conspiring with AI companies. My guess is that there could be an organization with similar goals to PauseAI that I felt much more excited for.

How much of a consensus is there on pausing AI

Not much compared to the push to get the stuff that already exists out to full deployment (For various institutions this is meaningful impact on profit margins). 

People don't want to fight that, even if they think that further capabilities are bad price/risk/benefits tradeoff.

There is a co-ordination problem where if you ask to pause and people say no, you can't make other asks.

3rd. They might just not mesh/trust that particular movement and the consolidation of platform it represents, and so want to make points on their own instead of joining a bigger organizations demands. 

One particular reason that I haven't seen addressed very much in why I don't support/endorse PauseAI, beyond the usual objections, is that there probably aren't going to be that many warning shots that can actually affect policy, at least conditional on misalignment being a serious problem (which doesn't translate to >50% probability of doom), because the most likely takeover plan (at least assuming no foom/software intelligence explosion) fundamentally relies not on killing people, but on launching internal rogue deployments to sabotage alignment work and figuring out a way to control the AI company's compute, since catastrophe/existential risk is much harder than launching a internal rogue deployment (without defenses).

So PauseAI's theory of change fundamentally requires that we live in worlds where both alignment is hard and effective warning shots exist, and these conditions are quite unlikely to be true, especially given that pausing is likely not the most effective action you could be doing from a comparative advantage perspective.

I'm not going to say that PauseAI is net-negative, and it has positive expected value, but IMO it's far less than a lot of pause advocates say:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rZcyemEpBHgb2hqLP/ai-control-may-increase-existential-risk#jChY95BeDeptDpnZK

Important part of the comment:

I think most of the effective strategies for AIs seeking power don't involve escalating to something which is much more likely to trigger a strong response than "the AI company caught the AI trying to escape". I think the best strategies are things like:

• Launch a rogue internal deployment.
• Sabotage a bunch of work done at the AI company. Or possibly some work done externally. This includes stuff like sabotaging alignment work, backdooring robot armies, backdooring future training runs, etc.
• Escape and then directly try to take over once your chances are sufficiently good that this is better than biding your time.
• Generally try to manipulate and persuade such that AI takeover is easier and more likely.

Of these, I think only escape could trigger a much stronger response if we catch it after it escalates some rather than before. I don't see how "we caught the AI trying to launch an unmonitored version of itself" is going to play that differently from "we caught that the AI did launch an unmonitored version of itself". Most of these don't escalate in some way which would trigger a response such that catching it after the fact is similar to catching an attempt. (In some cases where reversion is possible like work sabotage, there might be no meaningful distinction.) Further, without some effort on control, we might be much less likely to catch either! And, in some cases, control measures I'm interested in focus on after-the-fact detection.

I think AI safety has very limited political capital at the moment. Pausing AI just isn’t going to happen, so advocating for it makes you sound unreasonable and allows people to comfortably ignore your other opinions. I prefer trying to push for interventions which make a difference with much less political capital, like convincing frontier labs to work on and implement control measures.

I don't think survivable worlds, at our point in time, involve something like PauseAI. I don't condemn them, and welcome people to try. But it's feeling more and more like Hiroo Onoda, continuing to fight guerilla warfare in the Philipines for decades, refusing to believe the war was over.