Our 2017 fundraiser is complete! We’ve had an incredible month, with, by far, our largest fundraiser success to date. More than 300 distinct donors gave just over $2.5M1, doubling our third fundraising target of $1.25M. Thank you!

Our largest donation came toward the very end of the fundraiser in the form of an Ethereum donation worth $763,970 from Vitalik Buterin, the inventor and co-founder of Ethereum. Vitalik’s donation represents the third-largest single contribution we’ve received to date, after a $1.25M grant disbursement from the Open Philanthropy Project in October, and a $1.01M Ethereum donation in May.

In our mid-fundraiser update, we noted that MIRI was included in a large Matching Challenge: In partnership with Raising For Effective Giving, professional poker players Dan Smith, Tom Crowley and Martin Crowley announced they would match all donations to MIRI and nine other organizations through the end of December. Donors helped get us to our matching cap of $300k within 2 weeks, resulting in a $300k match from Dan, Tom, and Martin (thanks guys!). Other big winners from the Matching Challenge, which raised $4.5m (match included) in less than 3 weeks, include GiveDirectly ($588k donated) and the Good Food Institute ($416k donated).

Other big donations we received in December included:

• $367,575 from Christian Calderon
• $100,000 from the Berkeley Existential Risk Institute
• $59,251 from Marius van Voorden

We also received substantial support from medium-sized donors: a total of $631,595 from the 42 donors who gave $5,000–$50,000 and a total of $113,556 from the 75 who gave $500–$5,000 (graph). We also are grateful to donors who leveraged their employers’ matching generosity, donating a combined amount of over $100,000 during December.

66% of funds donated during this fundraiser were in the form of cryptocurrency (mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum), including Vitalik, Marius, and Christian’s donations, along with Dan, Tom, and Martin’s matching contributions.

Overall, we’ve had an amazingly successful month and a remarkable year! I’m extremely grateful for all the support we’ve received, and excited about the opportunity this creates for us to grow our research team more quickly. For details on our growth plans, see our fundraiser post.

1. The exact total might increase slightly over the coming weeks as we process donations initiated in December 2017 that arrive in January 2018. [↩]

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 the Challenge.

Professional poker players Martin Crowley, Tom Crowley, and Dan Smith, in partnership with Raising for Effective Giving, have just announced a $1 million Matching Challenge and included MIRI among the 10 organizations they are supporting!

Give to any of the organizations involved before noon (PST) on December 31 for your donation to be eligible for a dollar-for-dollar match, up to the $1 million limit!

The eligible organizations for matching are:

• Animal welfare — Effective Altruism Funds’ animal welfare fund, The Good Food Institute
• Global health and development — Against Malaria Foundation, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, Helen Keller International’s vitamin A supplementation program, GiveDirectly
• Global catastrophic risk — MIRI
• Criminal justice reform — Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, Massachusetts Bail Fund, Just City Memphis

The Matching Challenge’s website lists two options for MIRI donors to get matched: (1) donating on 2017charitydrive.com, or (2) donating directly on MIRI’s website and sending the receipt to receiptsforcharity@gmail.com. We recommend option 2, particularly for US tax residents (because MIRI is a 501(c)(3) organization) and those looking for a wider array of payment methods.

In other news, we’ve hit our first fundraising target ($625,000)!

We’re also happy to announce that we’ve received a $368k bitcoin donation from Christian Calderon, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, and also a donation worth $59k from early bitcoin investor Marius van Voorden.

In total, so far, we’ve received donations valued $697,638 from 137 distinct donors, 76% of it in the form of cryptocurrency (48% if we exclude Christian’s donation). Thanks as well to Jacob Falkovich for his fundraiser/matching post whose opinion distribution curves plausibly raised over $27k for MIRI this week, including his match.

Our funding drive will be continuing through the end of December, along with the Matching Challenge. Current progress (updated live):

Correction December 17: I previously listed GiveWell as one of the eligible organizations for matching, which is not correct.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is looking for a very specialized autodidact to keep us up to date on developments in machine learning—a “living library” of new results.

ML is a fast-moving and diverse field, making it a challenge for any group to stay updated on all the latest and greatest developments. To support our AI alignment research efforts, we want to hire someone to read every interesting-looking paper about AI and machine learning, and keep us abreast of noteworthy developments, including new techniques and insights.

We expect that this will sound like a very fun job to a lot of people! However, this role is important to us, and we need to be appropriately discerning—we do not recommend applying if you do not already have a proven ability in this or neighboring domains.

Our goal is to hire full-time, ideally for someone who would be capable of making a multi-year commitment—we intend to pay you to become an expert on the cutting edge of machine learning, and don’t want to make the human capital investment unless you’re interested in working with us long-term.

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