We ran two research workshops this month: a veterans’ workshop on decision theory for long-time collaborators and staff, and a machine learning workshop focusing on generalizable environmental goals, impact measures, and mild optimization.
AI researcher Abram Demski has accepted a research fellowship at MIRI, pending the completion of his PhD. He’ll be starting here in late 2016 / early 2017.
Data scientist Ryan Carey is joining MIRI’s ML-oriented team this month as an assistant research fellow.
General updates
MIRI’s 2016 strategy update outlines how our research plans have changed in light of recent developments. We also announce a generous $300,000 gift — our second-largest single donation to date.
We’ve uploaded nine talks from CSRBAI’s robustness and preference specification weeks, including Jessica Taylor on “Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems” (video), Jan Leike on “General Reinforcement Learning” (video), Paul Christiano on “Training an Aligned RL Agent” (video), and Dylan Hadfield-Menell on “The Off-Switch” (video).
We hired two new admins: Office Manager Aaron Silverbook, and Communications and Development Strategist Colm Ó Riain.
News and links
The Open Philanthropy Project awards $5.6 million to Stuart Russell to launch an academic AI safety research institute: the Center for Human-Compatible AI.
Elon Musk explains: “I think the biggest risk is not that the AI will develop a will of its own, but rather that it will follow the will of people that establish its utility function, or its optimization function. And that optimization function, if it is not well-thought-out — even if its intent is benign, it could have quite a bad outcome.”
