MIRI has been awarded its largest grant to date — $7,703,750 split over two years from Open Philanthropy, in partnership with Ben Delo, co-founder of the cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX!
(Update: Open Philanthropy decided not to move forward with its partnership with Ben Delo. This doesn’t affect the size of the grant we received, but means that other funders provided the funds for Open Phil’s grant.)
We have also been awarded generous grants by the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative ($300,000) and the Long-Term Future Fund ($100,000). Our thanks to everybody involved!
Other updates
- Buck Shlegeris of MIRI and Rohin Shah of CHAI discuss Rohin's 2018–2019 overview of technical AI alignment research on the AI Alignment Podcast.
- From MIRI's Abram Demski: Thinking About Filtered Evidence Is (Very!) Hard and Bayesian Evolving-to-Extinction. And from Evan Hubinger: Synthesizing Amplification and Debate.
- From OpenAI's Beth Barnes, Paul Christiano, Long Ouyang, and Geoffrey Irving: Progress on AI Safety via Debate.
- Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits: OpenAI's Olah, Cammarata, Schubert, Goh, Petrov, and Carter argue, “Features are the fundamental unit of neural networks. They correspond to directions [in the space of neuron activations]. […] Features are connected by weights, forming circuits. […] Analogous features and circuits form across models and tasks.”
- DeepMind's Agent57 appears to meet one of the AI benchmarks in AI Impacts' 2016 survey, “outperform professional game testers on all Atari games using no game specific knowledge”, earlier than NeurIPS/ICML authors predicted.
- From DeepMind Safety Research: Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity.