2013 in Review: Outreach

Posted by & filed under MIRI Strategy.

This is the 2nd part of my personal and qualitative self-review of MIRI in 2013. By “outreach” I refer to general outreach efforts, rather than e.g. outreach to specific researchers, which will be discussed in the post about MIRI’s 2013 research activities.   Outeach in 2013 In early 2013, we decided to reduce our outreach efforts significantly,… Read more »

Want to help MIRI by investing in XRP?

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Recently, Mt.Gox and Ripple creator Jed McCaleb gave MIRI a large donation in XRP, which is the #2 cryptocurrency in market cap behind Bitcoin. This gift, along with our recent successful fundraiser, should enable us to hire the beginnings of a full-time Friendly AI research team in 2014. It’s difficult to know exactly how to… Read more »

MIRI’s January 2014 Newsletter

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Dear friends,Wow! MIRI’s donors finished our Winter 2013 fundraising drive three weeks early. Our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed. Research Updates MIRI’s December workshop resulted in 7 new technical reports and one new paper. Photos from the workshop are here. New paper by Luke Muehlhauser and Nick Bostrom: “Why We Need Friendly AI.” io9’s… Read more »

MIRI strategy conversation with Steinhardt, Karnofsky, and Amodei

Posted by & filed under Conversations, MIRI Strategy.

On October 27th, 2013, MIRI met with three additional members of the effective altruism community to discuss MIRI’s organizational strategy. The participants were: Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow at MIRI) Luke Muehlhauser (executive director at MIRI) Holden Karnofsky (co-CEO at GiveWell) Jacob Steinhardt (grad student in computer science at Stanford) Dario Amodei (post-doc in biophysics at… Read more »

Kathleen Fisher on High-Assurance Systems

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Dr. Kathleen Fisher joined DARPA as a program manager in 2011. Her research and development interests relate to programming languages and high assurance systems. Dr. Fisher joined DARPA from Tufts University. Previously, she worked as a Principal Member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs. Dr. Fisher received her Doctor of Philosophy in computer science… Read more »

Donor Story #1: Noticing Inferential Distance

Posted by & filed under Guest Posts.

2013 was by far MIRI’s most successful fundraising year (more details later), so now we’re talking to our donors to figure out: “Okay, what exactly are we doing so right?” Below is one donor’s story, anonymized and published with permission: My decision to donate was heavily dependent upon MIRI’s relationship with LessWrong. I did look into MIRI… Read more »

7 New Technical Reports, and a New Paper

Posted by & filed under Papers.

Recently, MIRI released 7 brief technical reports that explain several pieces of theoretical progress made at our December 2013 research workshop. Several of these results build on work done at our July and November 2013 workshops, and also on between-workshop research by Paul Christiano, Benja Fallenstein, and others. To understand these technical reports in context,… Read more »

Winter 2013 Fundraiser Completed!

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Wow! MIRI’s donors just finished our 2013 winter matching challenge three weeks ahead of the deadline! As it happens, the person who finished this drive was Patrick LaVictoire, who says his donation was the product of his altruism tip jar habit. I did not expect to finish the fundraiser so quickly. Basically, this happened because the… Read more »