Our primary focus at MIRI in 2018 was twofold: research—as always!—and growth. Thanks to the incredible support we received from donors the previous year, in 2018 we were able to aggressively pursue the plans detailed in our 2017 fundraiser post....
This post reviews MIRI’s activities in 2017, including research, recruiting, exposition, and fundraising activities. 2017 was a big transitional year for MIRI, as we took on new research projects that have a much greater reliance on hands-on programming work and...
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....
Update Nov. 23: This post was edited to reflect Scott’s terminology change from “naturalized world-models” to “embedded world-models.” For a full introduction to these four research problems, see Scott Garrabrant and Abram Demski’s “Embedded Agency.” Scott Garrabrant is taking over...
Update 2017-12-27: We’ve blown past our 3rd and final target, and reached the matching cap of $300,000 for the $2 million Matching Challenge! Thanks so much to everyone who supported us! All donations made before 23:59 PST on Dec 31st...
In our last strategy update (August 2016), Nate wrote that MIRI’s priorities were to make progress on our agent foundations agenda and begin work on our new “Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems” agenda, to collaborate and communicate with other...