2012 Winter Matching Challenge!

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Thanks to the generosity of several major donors, every donation to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute made now until January 5th, 2013 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $115,000!

Donate Now!

$0

$28.75K

$57.5K

$86.25K

$115K

Now is your chance to double your impact while helping us raise up to $230,000 to help fund our research program.

(If you’re unfamiliar with our mission, please see our press kit and read our short research summary: Reducing Long-Term Catastrophic Risks from Artificial Intelligence.)

Now that Singularity University has acquired the Singularity Summit, and SI’s interests in rationality training are being developed by the now-separate CFAR, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is making a profound transition. (Note that most of the money from the acquisition is being placed in a separate fund for Friendly AI researchers, and therefore does not support our daily operations or other programs.)

For 12 years we’ve largely focused on movement-building — through the Singularity Summit, Less Wrong, and other programs. This work was needed to build up a community of support for our mission and a pool of potential researchers for our unique interdisciplinary work.

Now, the time has come to say “Mission Accomplished.” Or at least, “Mission Accomplished Well Enough to Pivot to Research.” Our community of supporters is now large enough that many qualified researchers are available for us to hire, if we can afford to hire them.

Having published 30+ research papers and dozens more original research articles on Less Wrong, we certainly haven’t neglected research. But in 2013 we plan to pivot so that a much larger share of the funds we raise is spent on research.

Accomplishments in 2012

Future Plans You Can Help Support

In the coming months, we plan to do the following:

  • As part of Singularity University’s acquisition of the Singularity Summit, we will be changing our name and launching a new website.
  • Eliezer will publish his sequence Open Problems in Friendly AI.
  • We will publish nicely-edited ebooks (Kindle, iBooks, and PDF) for many of our core materials, to make them more accessible: The Sequences, 2006-2009, Facing the Singularity, and The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI Foom Debate.
  • We will publish several more research papers, including “Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey” and a short, technical introduction to timeless decision theory.
  • We will set up the infrastructure required to host a productive Friendly AI team and try hard to recruit enough top-level math talent to launch it.

(Other projects are still being surveyed for likely cost and strategic impact.)

We appreciate your support for our high-impact work! Donate now, and seize a better than usual chance to move our work forward. Credit card transactions are securely processed using either PayPal or Google Checkout. If you have questions about donating, please contact Louie Helm at (510) 717-1477 or louie@intelligence.org.

$115,000 of total matching funds has been provided by Edwin Evans, Mihály Bárász, Rob Zahra, Alexei Andreev, Jeff Bone, Michael Blume, Guy Srinivasan, and Kevin Fischer.