News and links Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their foundational contributions to machine learning. In a press conference following the announcement, Hinton said that “if you look around, there are very few examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things,...

MIRI updates Aaron Scher and Joe Collman have joined the Technical Governance Team at MIRI as researchers. Aaron previously did independent research related to sycophancy in language models and mechanistic interpretability, while Joe previously did independent research related to AI safety via debate and contributed to field-building work at MATS...

Update (7-15-2024): this newsletter originally included Eliezer’s interview with Bloomberg’s Nate Lanxon and Jackie Davalos, which I mistakenly thought was released recently. That interview was actually released last year. MIRI updates Rob Bensinger suggests that AI risk discourse could be improved by adopting a new set of labels for different...

MIRI updates MIRI Communications Manager Gretta Duleba explains MIRI’s current communications strategy. We hope to clearly communicate to policymakers and the general public why there’s an urgent need to shut down frontier AI development, and make the case for installing an “off-switch”. This will not be easy, and there is a lot of work...

As we explained in our MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy update, MIRI has pivoted to prioritize policy, communications, and technical governance research over technical alignment research. This follow-up post goes into detail about our communications strategy. The Objective: Shut it Down1 Our objective is to convince major powers to shut down the development...

Update (5-15-2024): I wrote that “it appears that not all of the leading AI labs are honoring the voluntary agreements they made at [AI Safety Summit],” citing a Politico article. However, after seeing more discussion about it (e.g. here), I am now highly uncertain about whether the labs made specific commitments, what those commitments were, and...