1. (a) grow the research team, (b) engage more with mainstream academia. I'd also like to spend some time experimenting to figure out how to structure the research team so as to make it more effective (we have a lot of flexibility here that mainstream academic institutes don't have). Once we have the first team growing steadily and running smoothly, it's not entirely clear whether the next step will be (c.1) grow it faster or (c.2) spin up a second team inside MIRI taking a different approach to AI alignment. I'll punt that question to future-Nate.
2. So first of all, I'm not convinced that there's less of a role for supporters. If we had just ten people earning-to-give at the (amazing!) level of Ethan Dickinson, Jesse Liptrap, Mike Blume, or Alexei Andreev (note: Alexei recently stopped earning-to-give in order to found a startup), that would bring in as much money per year as the Thiel Foundation. (I think people often vastly overestimate how many people are earning-to-give to MIRI, and underestimate how useful it is: the small donors taken together make a pretty big difference!)

Furthermore, if we successfully execute on (a) above, then we're going to be burning through money quite a bit faster than before. An FLI grant (if we get one) will certainly help, but I expect it's going to be a little while before MIRI can support itself on large donations & grants alone.

As for how I plan to keep supporters engaged & donating, I don't expect it will be that much of a problem: I think that many of our donors are excited to see us publish peer-reviewed papers, attend conferences, and engage in the ongoing global conversation. It's hard for me to say for sure, but it seems quite likely that the last year has been much more exciting for MIRI donors than the previous few years, even though there was no Singularity Summit and most of our output was math.

Now that MIRI is focused on math research (a good move) and not on outreach

Any links on this?