MIRI's 2014 Summer Matching Challenge

post by lukeprog · 2014-08-07T20:03:24.171Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 32 comments

Contents

    Donate Now
  Accomplishments Since Our Winter 2013 Fundraiser Launched:
  Ongoing Activities You Can Help Support
None
32 comments

(Cross-posted from MIRI's blog. MIRI maintains Less Wrong, with generous help from Trike Apps, and much of the core content is written by salaried MIRI staff members.)

Thanks to the generosity of several major donors,^† every donation made to MIRI between now and August 15th, 2014 will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $200,000!  

Now is your chance to double your impact while helping us raise up to $400,000 (with matching) to fund our research program.

Corporate matching and monthly giving pledges will count towards the total! Please email malo@intelligence.org if you intend on leveraging corporate matching (check here, to see if your employer will match your donation) or would like to pledge 6 months of monthly donations, so that we can properly account for your contributions towards the fundraiser.

(If you're unfamiliar with our mission, see: Why MIRI?)

Donate Now

 

Accomplishments Since Our Winter 2013 Fundraiser Launched:

• Hired 2 new Friendly AI researchers, Benja Fallenstein & Nate Soares. Since March, they've authored or co-authored 4 papers/reports, with several others in the works. Right now they're traveling, to present papers at the Vienna Summer of Logic, AAAI-14, and AGI-14.
• 5 new papers & book chapters: “Why We Need Friendly AI,” “The errors, insights, and lessons of famous AI predictions,” “Problems of self-reference...,” “Program equilibrium...,” and “The ethics of artificial intelligence.”
• 11 new technical reports: 7 reports from the December 2013 workshop, “Botworld,” “Loudness...,” “Distributions allowing tiling...,” and “Non-omniscience...”
• New book: Smarter Than Us, published both as an e-book and a paperback.
• Held one MIRI workshop and launched the MIRIx program, which currently supports 8 independently-organized Friendly AI discussion/research groups around the world.
• New analyses: Robby's posts on naturalized induction, Luke's list of 70+ studies which could improve our picture of superintelligence strategy, “Exponential and non-exponential trends in information technology,” “The world's distribution of computation,” “How big is the field of artificial intelligence?,” “Robust cooperation: A case study in Friendly AI research,” “Is my view contrarian?,” and “Can we really upload Johnny Depp's brain?”
• Won $60,000+ in matching and prizes from sources that wouldn't have otherwise given to MIRI, via the Silicon Valley Gives fundraiser. (Thanks again, all you dedicated donors!)
• 49 new expert interviews, including interviews with Scott Aaronson (MIT), Max Tegmark (MIT), Kathleen Fisher (DARPA), Suresh Jagannathan (DARPA), André Platzer (CMU), Anil Nerode (Cornell), John Baez (UC Riverside), Jonathan Millen (MITRE), and Roger Schell.
• 4 transcribed conversations about MIRI strategy: 1, 2, 3, 4.
• Published a thorough “2013 in review.”

Ongoing Activities You Can Help Support

• We're writing an overview of the Friendly AI technical agenda (as we see it) so far.
• We're currently developing and testing several tutorials on different pieces of the Friendly AI technical agenda (tiling agents, modal agents, etc.).
• We're writing several more papers and reports.
• We're growing the MIRIx program, largely to grow the pool of people we can plausibly hire as full-time FAI researchers in the next couple years.
• We're planning, or helping to plan, multiple research workshops, including the May 2015 decision theory workshop at Cambridge University.
• We're finishing the editing for a book version of Eliezer's Sequences.
• We're helping to fund further SPARC activity, which provides education and skill-building to elite young math talent, and introduces them to ideas like effective altruism and global catastrophic risks.
• We're continuing to discuss formal collaboration opportunities with UC Berkeley faculty and development staff.
• We're helping Nick Bostrom promote his Superintelligence book in the U.S.
• We're investigating opportunities for supporting Friendly AI research via federal funding sources such as the NSF.

Other projects are still being surveyed for likely cost and impact. See also our mid-2014 strategic plan. We appreciate your support for our work!

Donate now, and seize a better than usual opportunity to move our work forward. If you have questions about donating, please contact Malo Bourgon at malo@intelligence.org.

^† $200,000 of total matching funds has been provided by Jaan Tallinn, Edwin Evans, and Rick Schwall.

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