For many years, MIRI’s goal has been to resolve enough fundamental confusions around alignment and intelligence to enable humanity to think clearly about technical AI safety risks—and to do this before this technology advances to the point of potential catastrophe. This goal has always seemed to us to be difficult, but possible.1 Last year, we… Read more »
Posts By: Nate Soares
Ensuring smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive outcome
I recently gave a talk at Google on the problem of aligning smarter-than-human AI with operators’ goals: The talk was inspired by “AI Alignment: Why It’s Hard, and Where to Start,” and serves as an introduction to the subfield of alignment research in AI. A modified transcript follows. Talk outline (slides): 1. Overview… Read more »
Post-fundraiser update
We concluded our 2016 fundraiser eleven days ago. Progress was slow at first, but our donors came together in a big way in the final week, nearly doubling our final total. In the end, donors raised $589,316 over six weeks, making this our second-largest fundraiser to date. I’m heartened by this show of support, and… Read more »
MIRI’s 2016 Fundraiser
Update December 22: Our donors came together during the fundraiser to get us most of the way to our $750,000 goal. In all, 251 donors contributed $589,248, making this our second-biggest fundraiser to date. Although we fell short of our target by $160,000, we have since made up this shortfall thanks to November/December donors. I’m… Read more »
New paper: “Logical induction”
MIRI is releasing a paper introducing a new model of deductively limited reasoning: “Logical induction,” authored by Scott Garrabrant, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, Andrew Critch, myself, and Jessica Taylor. Readers may wish to start with the abridged version. Consider a setting where a reasoner is observing a deductive process (such as a community of mathematicians and computer… Read more »
Grant announcement from the Open Philanthropy Project
A major announcement today: the Open Philanthropy Project has granted MIRI $500,000 over the coming year to study the questions outlined in our agent foundations and machine learning research agendas, with a strong chance of renewal next year. This represents MIRI’s largest grant to date, and our second-largest single contribution. Coming on the heels of… Read more »
MIRI strategy update: 2016
This post is a follow-up to Malo’s 2015 review, sketching out our new 2016-2017 plans. Briefly, our top priorities (in decreasing order of importance) are to (1) make technical progress on the research problems we’ve identified, (2) expand our team, and (3) build stronger ties to the wider research community. As discussed in a previous… Read more »
Submission to the OSTP on AI outcomes
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently put out a request for information on “(1) The legal and governance implications of AI; (2) the use of AI for public good; (3) the safety and control issues for AI; (4) the social and economic implications of AI;” and a variety of related topics…. Read more »
