October 2016 Newsletter

Our big announcement this month is our paper “Logical Induction,” introducing an algorithm that learns to assign reasonable probabilities to mathematical, empirical, and self-referential claims in a way that outpaces deduction. MIRI’s 2016 fundraiser is also live, and runs through the end of October.

Research updates

Shtetl-Optimized and n-Category Café discuss the “Logical Induction” paper.
New at IAFF: Universal Inductors; Logical Inductors That Trust Their Limits; Variations of the Garrabrant-inductor; The Set of Logical Inductors Is Not Convex
New at AI Impacts: What If You Turned the World’s Hardware into AI Minds?; Tom Griffiths on Cognitive Science and AI; and a Superintelligence excerpt on sources of advantage for digital intelligence.

General updates

We wrote up a more detailed fundraiser post for the Effective Altruism Forum, outlining our research methodology and the basic case for MIRI.
We’ll be running an “Ask MIRI Anything” on the EA Forum this Wednesday, Oct. 12.
The Open Philanthropy Project has awarded MIRI a one-year $500,000 grant to expand our research program. See also Holden Karnofsky’s account of how his views on EA and AI have changed.

News and links

Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny: a profile by The New Yorker.
In a promising development, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft team up to launch a Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society aimed at developing industry best practices.
Alex Tabarrok vs. Tyler Cowen: “Will Machines Take Our Jobs?” (video)
Google Brain makes major strides in machine translation.
A Sam Harris TED talk: “Can we build AI without losing control of it?” (video)
A number of updates from the Future of Humanity Institute.
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk is accepting abstracts (due Oct. 18) for its first conference, on such topics as “creating a community for beneficial AI.”
Andrew Critch: Interested in AI alignment? Apply to Berkeley.

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