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.
Re 2, Sam and Eliezer have been corresponding for a while now. They’ve been exploring the possibility of pursuing a couple of different projects together, including co-authoring a book or recording a dialogue of some sort and publishing it online. Sam discussed this briefly on an episode of his podcast. We’ll mention in the newsletter if things get more finalized.
Re 3, it varies a lot month-to-month and person-to-person. Looking at the data, the average and median are pretty close at somewhere between 40–50 hours a week depending on the month. During crunch times some people might be working 60–100-hour weeks.
I’ll also mention that although people at MIRI roughly track how many hours they spend working, and on what, I don’t put much weight on these numbers (especially for researchers). If a researcher comes up with a new idea in the shower, at the gym, on their walk to work, or whatever, I don’t expect them to log those hours as work time. (Fun fact: Scott came up with logical induction on his walk to work.) Many of us are thinking about work when we aren’t at our desks, so to speak. It’s also hard to compare someone who spends 80 hours working on a problem they love and find really exciting, to someone who spends 40 hours on really grueling tasks. I prefer to focus on how much people are getting done and how they are feeling.
Re 4, for me personally, I think my biggest mistake this year was not delegating enough after transitioning into the COO role. This caused a few ops projects to be blocked on me unnecessarily, which set a few ops projects back a few months. (For example, I finished our 2015-in-review document significantly later than I would have liked.)
Isaac Asimov wrote an essay on creativity, here's one of the interesting points:
... (read more)