The MIRI Newsletter is back in action after a hiatus since July 2022. To recap some of the biggest MIRI developments since then: MIRI released its 2024 Mission and Strategy Update, announcing a major shift in focus: While we’re continuing to support various technical research programs at MIRI, our new top priority is broad public communication...

As we announced back in October, I have taken on the senior leadership role at MIRI as its CEO. It’s a big pair of shoes to fill, and an awesome responsibility that I’m honored to take on. There have been several changes at MIRI since our 2020 strategic update, so let’s get into it.1 The short version: We think it’s very unlikely that the AI...

Today, December 6th, 2023, I participated in the U.S. Senate’s eighth bipartisan AI Insight Forum, which focused on the topic of “Risk, Alignment, & Guarding Against Doomsday Scenarios.” I’d like to thank Leader Schumer, and Senators Rounds, Heinrich, and Young, for the invitation to participate in the Forum. One of the central points I made...

Status: Vague, sorry. The point seems almost tautological to me, and yet also seems like the correct answer to the people going around saying “LLMs turned out to be not very want-y, when are the people who expected ‘agents’ going to update?”, so, here we are. Okay, so you know how AI today isn’t great at certain… let’s say “long-horizon” tasks? Like...

Over the next two days, the UK government is hosting an AI Safety Summit focused on “the safe and responsible development of frontier AI”. They requested that seven companies (Amazon, Anthropic, DeepMind, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI) “outline their AI Safety Policies across nine areas of AI Safety”. Below, I’ll give my thoughts on the nine...

AI used to be a science. In the old days (back when AI didn’t work very well), people were attempting to develop a working theory of cognition. Those scientists didn’t succeed, and those days are behind us. For most people working in AI today and dividing up their work hours between tasks, gone is the ambition to understand minds. People working...