MILA gets a grant for AI safety research

post by Dr_Manhattan · 2017-07-21T15:34:55.493Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 3 comments

http://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/montreal-institute-learning-algorithms-ai-safety-research

The really good news is that Yoshua Bengio is leading this (he is extremely credible in modern AI/deep learning world), and this is a pretty large change of mind for him. When I spoke to him at a conference 3 years ago he was pretty dismissive of the whole issue; this year's FLI conference seems to have changed his mind (kudos to them)

Of course huge props to OpenPhil for pursuing this

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comment by LawrenceC (LawChan) · 2017-07-23T05:06:41.985Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Awesome! I heard a rumor that David Krueger (one of Bengio's grad students) is one of the main people pushing the safety initiative there, can anyone confirm?

Replies from: Vika, kvas_duplicate0.1636121129676118
↑ comment by Vika · 2017-07-25T21:12:44.244Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes. He runs AI safety meetups at MILA, and played a significant role in getting Yoshua Bengio more interested in safety.

↑ comment by kvas_duplicate0.1636121129676118 · 2017-07-23T20:04:45.097Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I know that David Krueger is one of the people working with 80000 hours on helping people to get into the AI safety field. He also organized a related google group.