MIRI AMA plus updates
MIRI is running an AMA on the Effective Altruism Forum tomorrow (Wednesday, Oct. 11): Ask MIRI Anything. Questions are welcome in the interim!
Nate also recently posted a more detailed version of our 2016 fundraising pitch to the EA Forum. One of the additions is about our first funding target:
We feel reasonably good about our chance of hitting target 1, but it isn’t a sure thing; we’ll probably need to see support from new donors in order to hit our target, to offset the fact that a few of our regular donors are giving less than usual this year.
The Why MIRI’s Approach? section also touches on new topics that we haven’t talked about in much detail in the past, but plan to write up some blog posts about in the future. In particular:
Loosely speaking, we can imagine the space of all smarter-than-human AI systems as an extremely wide and heterogeneous space, in which “alignable AI designs” is a small and narrow target (and “aligned AI designs” smaller and narrower still). I think that the most important thing a marginal alignment researcher can do today is help ensure that the first generally intelligent systems humans design are in the “alignable” region. I think that this is unlikely to happen unless researchers have a fairly principled understanding of how the systems they’re developing reason, and how that reasoning connects to the intended objectives.
Most of our work is therefore aimed at seeding the field with ideas that may inspire more AI research in the vicinity of (what we expect to be) alignable AI designs. When the first general reasoning machines are developed, we want the developers to be sampling from a space of designs and techniques that are more understandable and reliable than what’s possible in AI today.
In other news, we’ve uploaded a new intro talk on our most recent result, “Logical Induction,” that goes into more of the technical details than our previous talk.
See also Shtetl-Optimized and n-Category Café for recent discussions of the paper.
I realize this post is old, I just wanted to highlight that I was searching for Logical Induction discussion and this proved the best source of introductory information available. I therefore encourage more posts like this overall, because they add value to the site as a repository of information.