January 2017 Newsletter

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s new introductory talk on AI safety is out, in text and video forms: “The AI Alignment Problem: Why It’s Hard, and Where to Start.” Other big news includes the release of version 1 of Ethically Aligned Design, an IEEE recommendations document with a section on artificial general intelligence that we helped draft.

Research updates

A new paper: “Optimal Polynomial-Time Predictors: A Bayesian Notion of Approximation Algorithm.”
New at IAFF: The Universal Prior is Malign; Jessica Taylor’s Take on Paul Christiano and MIRI’s Disagreement on Alignability of Messy AI
New at AI Impacts: Concrete AI Tasks for Forecasting
We ran our third workshop on machine learning and AI safety, focusing on (among other topics) mild optimization and conservative concept learning.
MIRI Research Fellow Andrew Critch is spending part of his time at the Center for Human-Compatible AI as a visiting scholar.

General updates

I’m happy to announce that our informal November/December fundraising push was a success, with donations totaling ~$450,000! To all of our supporters, on MIRI’s behalf: thank you. Special thanks to Raising for Effective Giving, who contributed ~$96,000 in all to our fundraiser and our end-of-the-year push.
Open Philanthropy Project staff and 80,000 Hours highlight MIRI, the Future of Humanity Institute, and a number of other organizations as good giving opportunities for people still considering their donation options.
Critch spoke at the annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis (slides). We also attended the Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk and NIPS; see DeepMind researcher Viktoriya Krakovna’s NIPS safety paper highlights.
MIRI Executive Director Nate Soares gave a talk on logical induction at EAGxOxford, and participated in a panel discussion on “The Long-Term Situation in AI” with Krakovna, Demis Hassabis, Toby Ord, and Murray Shanahan.
Intelligence in Literature Prize: We’re helping administer a $100 prize each month to the best new fiction touching on ideas related to intelligence, AI, and the alignment problem. Send your submissions to intelligenceprize@gmail.com.

News and links

Gwern Branwen argues that more autonomous intelligent systems are likely to systematically outperform “tool-like” AI systems.
“Policy Desiderata in the Development of Machine Superintelligence“: Nick Bostrom, Allan Dafoe, and Carrick Flynn outline ten key AI policy considerations.
Faulty Reward Functions in the Wild: OpenAI’s Dario Amodei and Jack Clark illustrate a core obstacle to aligning reinforcement learning systems.
Open Phil updates its position: “On balance, our very tentative, unstable guess is the ‘last dollar’ we will give (from the pool of currently available capital) has higher expected value than gifts to GiveWell’s top charities today.”
Carl Shulman argues that risk-neutral philanthropists of all sizes who are well-aligned with Open Phil should use donor lotteries to rival Open Phil’s expected impact per dollar.

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