This page is a chronological list of noteworthy MIRI media appearances, press coverage, talks, and writings since our strategy pivot in early 2023. We’ve marked the entries we expect to be the most useful to check out with a star ().

 


January 2024


MIRI — “Without fundamental advances, misalignment and catastrophe are the default outcomes of training powerful AI.

In a new report, Peter Barnett and Jeremy Gillen argue that AI systems capable of large scale scientific research will likely pursue unwanted goals, with catastrophic results.

1h 8m read

 


December 2023


POLITICO Tech — “‘Humans are not some peak of cognitive ability’: The existential risks of AI.

Malo Bourgon is interviewed on AI x-risk and MIRI’s policy recommendations.

18m audio

 

Tech Policy Press (@techpolicypress) / X

Tech Policy Press — “US Senate AI ‘Insight Forum’ Tracker.

Press coverage of the AI Insight Forum. The relevant section is on Forum Eight. A choice quote:

[…] The eighth forum, focused on ‘doomsday scenarios,’ was divided into two parts, with the first hour dedicated to AI risks and the second on solutions for risk mitigation. It started with a question posed by Sen. Schumer, asking the seventeen participants to state their respective “p(doom)” and “p(hope)” probabilities for artificial general intelligence (AGI) in thirty seconds or less.

Some said it was ‘surreal’ and ‘mind boggling’ that p(dooms) were brought up in a Senate forum. “It’s encouraging that the conversation is happening, that we’re actually taking things seriously enough to be talking about that kind of topic here,” Malo Bourgon, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), told Tech Policy Press. […]

47m read

 

Washington Examiner — “‘Doomsday’ artificial intelligence: Schumer and Congress study existential risks.

A short piece on the “Risk, Alignment, and Guarding Against Doomsday Scenarios” Senate forum.

2m read

 

AI Insight Forum — “Written statement of MIRI CEO Malo Bourgon.

Malo Bourgon was one of sixteen people invited by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senators Todd Young, Mike Rounds, and Martin Heinrich to give written statements at the Eighth Bipartisan Senate Forum on Artificial Intelligence.

In our statement, we explain AI existential risk and propose a series of steps the US can take today to help address this risk, which we classify as “Domestic AI Regulation”, “Global AI Coalition”, and “Governing Computing Hardware”. As of April 2024, this continues to be MIRI’s primary resource for outlining our policy proposals.


9m read

 


November 2023


MIRI Blog — “Ability to solve long-horizon tasks correlates with wanting things in the behaviorist sense.

Nate Soares argues that “It’s no surprise that the AI falls down on various long-horizon tasks and that it doesn’t seem all that well-modeled as having ‘wants/desires’; these are two sides of the same coin.”

As AI improves on long-horizon tasks, Soares argues that we should expect AI to “cause some particular outcome across a wide array of starting setups and despite a wide variety of obstacles”, which introduces the classic risks of misaligned AI.


6m read

 


October 2023


MIRI Blog — “Thoughts on the AI Safety Summit company policy requests and responses.

Nate Soares and Matthew Gray review the UK government’s AI Safety Policy asks (including some glaring omissions), and review the submitted AI Safety Policies of seven participating organizations.

Soares ranks the organizations’ policies: “Anthropic > OpenAI >> DeepMind > Microsoft >> Amazon >> Meta”.

12m read

 

MIRI Blog — “AI as a science, and three obstacles to alignment strategies.

Nate Soares discusses three major hurdles humanity faces when it comes to “AI as a science”:

  1. Most research that helps one point AIs, probably also helps one make more capable AIs. A “science of AI” would probably increase the power of AI far sooner than it allows us to solve alignment.
  2. In a world without a mature science of AI, building a bureaucracy that reliably distinguishes real solutions from fake ones is prohibitively difficult.
  3. Fundamentally, for at least some aspects of system design, we’ll need to rely on a theory of cognition working on the first high-stakes real-world attempt.


13m read

 


July 2023


Will AI Destroy Us? - AI Virtual Roundtable

Conversations with Coleman — “Will AI Destroy Us?

Coleman Hughes hosts a roundtable discussion between Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Aaronson, and Gary Marcus.

1h 38m video

 

Bankless — “Tackling the Alignment Problem.

Nate Soares discusses existential risk from AI.

1h 12m video

 

Hold These Truths — “Can We Stop the AI Apocalypse?

A discussion of AI x-risk between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Dan Crenshaw.

1h 1m video

 

Eliezer Yudkowsky on AI doom & how to stop illegal boats – The Week in 60  Minutes | SpectatorTV

The Spectator — “Will AI Kill Us?

Yudkowsky appears on a segment of The Week in 60 Minutes to discuss why superintelligent AI is a massive extinction risk.

14m video

 

Bloomberg AI IRL — “The Only Winner of an AI Arms Race Will Be AI.

Eliezer Yudkowsky outlines the reasoning behind AI “doom” concerns.


24m video

 

The Guardian — “Five ways AI might destroy the world: ‘Everyone on Earth could fall over dead in the same second.’

Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses AGI ruin scenarios in a mini-essay, alongside short essays by Max Tegmark, Brittany Smith, Ajeya Cotra, and Yoshua Bengio.

10m read

 

The David Pakman Show — “AI will kill us all.

A short but very solid conversation with Yudkowsky on “the most dangerous thing we can’t imagine”. The discussion focuses on “What is the mechanism through which AI could exert control over the physical world?”, and on the implications of this scenario. Some quotes from Yudkowsky:

  • “It’s something that has its own plans. You don’t get to just plan how to use it; it is planning how to use itself.”
  • “I think my basic factual point of view is that if we do not somehow avoid doing this, we’re all going to die. And my corresponding policy view is that we should not do this, even if that’s really quite hard.”


19m video

 


May 2023


Econtalk — “Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Dangers of AI.

Yudkowsky and Russ Roberts debate whether AI poses an existential risk.

1h 18m video

 

The Logan Bartlett Show — “Eliezer Yudkowsky on if Humanity can Survive AI.

In possibly the best multi-hour video introduction to AI risk, Logan Bartlett and Eliezer Yudkowsky thoroughly and deeply talk about the shape of the risk.


3h 13m video

 

Extra: Why A Renowned A.I. Expert Says We May Be “Headed For A Catastrophe”  | FOX News Rundown

The Fox News Rundown — “Extra: Why A Renowned A.I. Expert Says We May Be ‘Headed For A Catastrophe.’

A podcast interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky, aimed at a general audience that wants to know the basics.

23m audio

 


April 2023


MIRI Blog — “The basic reasons I expect AGI ruin.

Rob Bensinger discusses the ten core reasons the situation with AI looks lethally dangerous to him, from likely capability advantages of STEM-capable AGI to alignment challenges.

16m read

 

Center for the Future Mind - YouTube

Center for the Future Mind — “Is Artificial General Intelligence too Dangerous to Build?

A live Florida Atlantic University Q&A session with Eliezer Yudkowsky.

1h 5m video

 

Will superintelligent AI end the world?

TED2023 — “Will superintelligent AI end the world?

In a TED Talk, Eliezer Yudkowsky makes a very concise version of the case for stopping progress toward smarter-than-human AI.


11m video

 

MIRI Blog — “Misgeneralization as a misnomer.

Nate Soares argues that “misgeneralization” is a misleading way to think about many AI alignment difficulties. E.g.:

[I]t’s not that primates were optimizing for fitness in the environment, and then “misgeneralized” after they found themselves in a broader environment full of junk food and condoms. The “aligned” behavior “in training” broke in the broader context of “deployment”, but not because the primates found some weird way to extend an existing “inclusive genetic fitness” concept to a wider domain. Their optimization just wasn’t connected to an internal representation of “inclusive genetic fitness” in the first place.

4m read

 

Dwarkesh Podcast — “Why AI Will Kill Us, Aligning LLMs, Nature of Intelligence, SciFi, & Rationality.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Eliezer Yudkowsky on AGI risk. Some good discussion ensues, though this isn’t the best first introduction to the topic.

4h 3m video

 


March 2023


Eliezer Yudkowsky: Dangers of AI and the End of Human Civilization | Lex  Fridman Podcast #368

Lex Fridman Podcast — “Dangers of AI and the End of Human Civilization.

Lex Fridman discusses a wide range of topics with Eliezer Yudkowsky.

3h 18m video

 

TIME Magazine — “Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down.

Eliezer Yudkowsky pens an op-ed arguing for an international ban on frontier AI development. (Mirror with addenda.)


11m read

 

MIRI Blog — “Deep Deceptiveness.

Nate Soares discusses a hypothetical example of AI deceptiveness, to illustrate why issues like deceptiveness can be hard to root out.

17m read

 

MIRI Blog — “Comments on OpenAI’s ‘Planning for AGI and beyond.’

Nate Soares shares his thoughts on an OpenAI strategy blog post by Sam Altman.

16m read

 


February 2023


Bankless Podcast — “We’re All Gonna Die.

Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the basics of AI risk in a long-form interview. (Transcript.)


1h 49m video

 

MIRI Blog — “Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone’s dropping the ball.

Nate Soares writes up some general advice for people who want to seriously tackle existential risk.


5m read