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 »
Posts By: Nate Soares
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 »
New papers dividing logical uncertainty into two subproblems
I’m happy to announce two new technical results related to the problem of logical uncertainty, perhaps our most significant results from the past year. In brief, these results split the problem of logical uncertainty into two distinct subproblems, each of which we can now solve in isolation. The remaining problem, in light of these results,… Read more »
MIRI has a new COO: Malo Bourgon
I’m happy to announce that Malo Bourgon, formerly a program management analyst at MIRI, has taken on a new leadership role as our chief operating officer. As MIRI’s second-in-command, Malo will be taking over a lot of the hands-on work of coordinating our day-to-day activities: supervising our ops team, planning events, managing our finances, and… Read more »
End-of-the-year fundraiser and grant successes
Our winter fundraising drive has concluded. Thank you all for your support! Through the month of December, 175 distinct donors gave a total of $351,298. Between this fundraiser and our summer fundraiser, which brought in $630k, we’ve seen a surge in our donor base; our previous fundraisers over the past five years had brought in… Read more »
Safety engineering, target selection, and alignment theory
Artificial intelligence capabilities research is aimed at making computer systems more intelligent — able to solve a wider range of problems more effectively and efficiently. We can distinguish this from research specifically aimed at making AI systems at various capability levels safer, or more “robust and beneficial.” In this post, I distinguish three kinds of direct… Read more »
OpenAI and other news
We’re only 11 days into December, and this month is shaping up to be a momentous one. On December 3, the University of Cambridge partnered with the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and UC Berkeley to launch the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk… Read more »
