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.
Thanks, Benito. With regards to the second half of this question, I suspect that either you’ve misunderstood some of the arguments I’ve made about why our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard academic journals and conferences, or (alternatively) someone has given arguments for why our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard academic venues that I personally disagree with. My view is that our work doesn’t tend to fit into standard journals etc. because (a) we deliberately focus on research that we think academia and industry are unlikely to work on for one reason or another, and (b) we approach problems from a very different angle than the research communities that are closest to those problems.
One example of (b) is that we often approach decision theory not by following the standard philosophical approach of thinking about what decision sounds intuitively reasonable in the first person, but instead by asking “how could a deterministic robot actually be programmed to reliably solve these problems”, which doesn’t fit super well into the surrounding literature on causal vs. evidential decision theory. For a few other examples, see my response to (8) in my comments on the Open Philanthropy Project’s internal and external reviews of some recent MIRI papers.