March 2018 Newsletter

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Updates New research write-ups and discussions: Knowledge is Freedom; Stable Pointers to Value II: Environmental Goals; Toward a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation; Robustness to Scale New at AI Impacts: Likelihood of Discontinuous Progress Around the Development of AGI The transcript is up for Sam Harris and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s podcast conversation. Andrew Critch, previously on leave… Read more »

Sam Harris and Eliezer Yudkowsky on “AI: Racing Toward the Brink”

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MIRI senior researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky was recently invited to be a guest on Sam Harris’ “Waking Up” podcast. Sam is a neuroscientist and popular author who writes on topics related to philosophy, religion, and public discourse. The following is a complete transcript of Sam and Eliezer’s conversation, AI: Racing Toward the Brink. Contents 1. Intelligence… Read more »

February 2018 Newsletter

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Updates New at IAFF: An Untrollable Mathematician New at AI Impacts: 2015 FLOPS Prices We presented “Incorrigibility in the CIRL Framework” at the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. From MIRI researcher Scott Garrabrant: Sources of Intuitions and Data on AGI News and links In “Adversarial Spheres,” Gilmer et al. investigate the tradeoff between test… Read more »

January 2018 Newsletter

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Our 2017 fundraiser was a huge success, with 341 donors contributing a total of $2.5 million! Some of the largest donations came from Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin, bitcoin investors Christian Calderon and Marius van Voorden, poker players Dan Smith and Tom and Martin Crowley (as part of a matching challenge), and the Berkeley Existential Risk… Read more »

End-of-the-year matching challenge!

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Update 2017-12-27: We’ve blown past our 3rd and final target, and reached the matching cap of $300,000 for the Matching Challenge! Thanks so much to everyone who supported us! All donations made before 23:59 PST on Dec 31st will continue to be counted towards our fundraiser total. The fundraiser total includes projected matching funds from… Read more »

December 2017 Newsletter

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  Our annual fundraiser is live. Discussed in the fundraiser post: News  — What MIRI’s researchers have been working on lately, and more. Goals — We plan to grow our research team 2x in 2018–2019. If we raise $850k this month, we think we can do that without dipping below a 1.5-year runway. Actual goals — A bigger-picture outline of… Read more »

Announcing “Inadequate Equilibria”

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MIRI Senior Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky has a new book out today: Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck, a discussion of societal dysfunction, exploitability, and self-evaluation. From the preface: Inadequate Equilibria is a book about a generalized notion of efficient markets, and how we can use this notion to guess where society will… Read more »

November 2017 Newsletter

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Eliezer Yudkowsky has written a new book on civilizational dysfunction and outperformance: Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck. The full book will be available in print and electronic formats November 16. To preorder the ebook or sign up for updates, visit equilibriabook.com. We’re posting the full contents online in stages over the next… Read more »