Hi, all! The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is answering questions here tomorrow, October 12 at 10am PDT. You can post questions below in the interim.
MIRI is a Berkeley-based research nonprofit that does basic research on key technical questions related to smarter-than-human artificial intelligence systems. Our research is largely aimed at developing a deeper and more formal understanding of such systems and their safety requirements, so that the research community is better-positioned to design systems that can be aligned with our interests. See here for more background.
Through the end of October, we're running our 2016 fundraiser — our most ambitious funding drive to date. Part of the goal of this AMA is to address questions about our future plans and funding gap, but we're also hoping to get very general questions about AI risk, very specialized questions about our technical work, and everything in between. Some of the biggest news at MIRI since Nate's AMA here last year:
- We developed a new framework for thinking about deductively limited reasoning, logical induction.
- Half of our research team started work on a new machine learning research agenda, distinct from our agent foundations agenda.
- We received a review and a $500k grant from the Open Philanthropy Project.
Likely participants in the AMA include:
- Nate Soares, Executive Director and primary author of the AF research agenda
- Malo Bourgon, Chief Operating Officer
- Rob Bensinger, Research Communications Manager
- Jessica Taylor, Research Fellow and primary author of the ML research agenda
- Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, Research Associate
Nate, Jessica, and Tsvi are also three of the co-authors of the "Logical Induction" paper.
EDIT (10:04am PDT): We're here! Answers on the way!
EDIT (10:55pm PDT): Thanks for all the great questions! That's all for now, though we'll post a few more answers tomorrow to things we didn't get to. If you'd like to support our AI safety work, our fundraiser will be continuing through the end of October.
Do you intend to submit Logical Induction to a relevant magazine for peer review and publication? Do you still hold with ~Eliezer2008 that people who currently object that MIRI doesn't participate in the orthodox scientific progress would still object for other reasons, even if you tried to address the lack of peer review?
Also why no /r/IAmA or /r/science AMA? The audience on this site seems limited from the start. Are you trying to target people who are already EAs in specific?
We’re submitting “Logical Induction” for publication, yeah. Benya and Jessica (and Stuart Armstrong, a MIRI research associate based at FHI) co-authored papers in a top-10 AI conference this year, UAI, and we plan to publish in similarly high-visibility venues in the future.
We’ve thought about doing a Reddit AMA sometime. It sounds fun, though it would probably need to focus more on basic background questions; EAs have a lot of overlapping knowledge, priorities, styles of thinking, etc. with MIRI, so we can take a lot of stuff for granted here that we coul... (read more)