Blog

Author: Nate Soares

Comments on OpenAI’s "Planning for AGI and beyond"

Sam Altman shared me on a draft of his OpenAI blog post Planning for AGI and beyond, and I left some comments, reproduced below without typos and with some added hyperlinks. Where the final version of the OpenAI post differs...

Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone’s dropping the ball

Writing down something I’ve found myself repeating in different conversations: If you’re looking for ways to help with the whole “the world looks pretty doomed” business, here’s my advice: look around for places where we’re all being total idiots. Look...

What I mean by “alignment is in large part about making cognition aimable at all”

(Epistemic status: attempting to clear up a misunderstanding about points I have attempted to make in the past. This post is not intended as an argument for those points.) I have long said that the lion’s share of the AI...

A central AI alignment problem: capabilities generalization, and the sharp left turn

(This post was factored out of a larger post that I (Nate Soares) wrote, with help from Rob Bensinger, who also rearranged some pieces and added some text to smooth things out. I’m not terribly happy with it, but am...

Visible Thoughts Project and Bounty Announcement

(Update Jan. 12, 2022: We released an FAQ last month, with more details. Last updated Jan. 7.) (Update Jan. 19, 2022: We now have an example of a successful partial run, which you can use to inform how you do...

2018 Update: Our New Research Directions

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....