Over the past few months, some major media outlets have been spreading concern about the idea that AI might spontaneously acquire sentience and turn against us. Many people have pointed out the flaws with this notion, including Andrew Ng, an AI scientist of some renown: I don’t see any realistic path from the stuff we… Read more »
Posts By: Nate Soares
What Sets MIRI Apart?
Last week, we received several questions from the effective altruist community in response to our fundraising post. Here’s Maxwell Fritz: […] My snap reaction to MIRI’s pitches has typically been, “yeah, AI is a real concern. But I have no idea whether MIRI are the right people to work on it, or if their approach… Read more »
Target 3: Taking It To The Next Level
One week ago, we hit our first fundraising target. I’m thrilled to announce that we’re now closing in on our second target: our fundraising total passed $400,000 today! As we approach target number two, we’re already taking active steps to grow our team. Jessica Taylor joined our core research team on August 1; another research… Read more »
MIRI’s Approach
MIRI’s mission is “to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact.” How can we ensure any such thing? It’s a daunting task, especially given that we don’t have any smarter-than-human machines to work with at the moment. In the previous post I discussed four background claims that motivate our mission;… Read more »
Four Background Claims
MIRI’s mission is to ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact. Why is this mission important, and why do we think that there’s work we can do today to help ensure any such thing? In this post and my next one, I’ll try to answer those questions. This post will… Read more »
Why Now Matters
I’m often asked whether donations now are more important than donations later. Allow me to deliver an emphatic yes: I currently expect that donations to MIRI today are worth much more than donations to MIRI in five years. As things stand, I would very likely take $10M today over $20M in five years. That’s a… Read more »
Targets 1 and 2: Growing MIRI
Momentum is picking up in the domain of AI safety engineering. MIRI needs to grow fast if it’s going to remain at the forefront of this new paradigm in AI research. To that end, we’re kicking off our 2015 Summer Fundraiser! Rather than naming a single funding target, we’ve decided to lay out the activities… Read more »
MIRI’s 2015 Summer Fundraiser!
This last year has been pretty astounding. Since its release twelve months ago, Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence has raised awareness about the challenge that MIRI exists to address: long-term risks posed by smarter-than-human artificially intelligent systems. Academic and industry leaders echoed these concerns in an open letter advocating “research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable… Read more »
