Research updates

• New at IAFF: Modeling the Capabilities of Advanced AI Systems as Episodic Reinforcement Learning; Simplified Explanation of Stratification
• New at AI Impacts: Friendly AI as a Global Public Good
• We ran two research workshops this month: a veterans’ workshop on decision theory for long-time collaborators and staff, and a machine learning workshop focusing on generalizable environmental goals, impact measures, and mild optimization.
• AI researcher Abram Demski has accepted a research fellowship at MIRI, pending the completion of his PhD. He’ll be starting here in late 2016 / early 2017.
• Data scientist Ryan Carey is joining MIRI’s ML-oriented team this month as an assistant research fellow.

General updates

• MIRI’s 2016 strategy update outlines how our research plans have changed in light of recent developments. We also announce a generous $300,000 gift — our second-largest single donation to date.
• We’ve uploaded nine talks from CSRBAI’s robustness and preference specification weeks, including Jessica Taylor on “Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems” (video), Jan Leike on “General Reinforcement Learning” (video), Paul Christiano on “Training an Aligned RL Agent” (video), and Dylan Hadfield-Menell on “The Off-Switch” (video).
• MIRI COO Malo Bourgon has been co-chairing a committee of IEEE’s Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems. He recently moderated a workshop on general AI and superintelligence at the initiative’s first meeting.
• We had a great time at Effective Altruism Global, and taught at SPARC.
• We hired two new admins: Office Manager Aaron Silverbook, and Communications and Development Strategist Colm Ó Riain.