Posts By: Harlan Stewart

News and links Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational contributions to machine learning. In a press conference following the announcement, Hinton said that “if you look around, there are very few examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things, which makes you… Read more »

MIRI updates Aaron Scher and Joe Collman have joined the Technical Governance Team at MIRI as researchers. Aaron previously did independent research related to sycophancy in language models and mechanistic interpretability, while Joe previously did independent research related to AI safety via debate and contributed to field-building work at MATS and BlueDot Impact. In an… Read more »

Update (7-15-2024): this newsletter originally included Eliezer’s interview with Bloomberg’s Nate Lanxon and Jackie Davalos, which I mistakenly thought was released recently. That interview was actually released last year. MIRI updates Rob Bensinger suggests that AI risk discourse could be improved by adopting a new set of labels for different perspectives on existential risk from AI…. Read more »

MIRI updates MIRI Communications Manager Gretta Duleba explains MIRI’s current communications strategy. We hope to clearly communicate to policymakers and the general public why there’s an urgent need to shut down frontier AI development, and make the case for installing an “off-switch”. This will not be easy, and there is a lot of work to… Read more »

Update (5-15-2024): I wrote that “it appears that not all of the leading AI labs are honoring the voluntary agreements they made at [AI Safety Summit],” citing a Politico article. However, after seeing more discussion about it (e.g. here), I am now highly uncertain about whether the labs made specific commitments, what those commitments were, and whether commitments… Read more »

The MIRI Newsletter is back in action after a hiatus since July 2022. To recap some of the biggest MIRI developments since then: MIRI released its 2024 Mission and Strategy Update, announcing a major shift in focus: While we’re continuing to support various technical research programs at MIRI, our new top priority is broad public… Read more »