Fair enough. I'll share a few examples of progress, though these won't be surprising to people who are on every mailing list, read every LW post, or are in the Bay Area and have regular conversations with us.

• much progress on the strategic landscape, e.g. differential technological development analyses, which you'll see in the forthcoming Anna/Luke chapter and in Nick's forthcoming monograph, and which you've already seen in several papers and talks over the past couple years (most of them involving Carl).
• progress on decision theory, largely via the decision theory workshop mailing list, in particular on UDT
• progress in outlining the sub-problems of singularity research, which I've started to write up here.
• progress on the value-loading problem, explained here and in a forthcoming paper by Dewey.
• progress on the reflectivity problem in the sense of identifying lots of potential solutions that probably won't work. :)
• progress on the preference extraction problem via incorporating the latest from decision neuroscience

Still, I'd say more of our work has been focused on movement-building than on cutting-edge research, because we think the most immediate concern is not on cutting-edge research but on building a larger community of support, funding, and researchers to work on these problems. Three researchers can have more of an impact if they create a platform by which 20 researchers can work on the problem than if they merely do research by themselves.

But you haven't given even the roughest outline of SI's progress on the thing that matters most, actual FAI research.

From what I understand they can't do that yet. They don't have enough people to make some actual progress on important problems. They also don't have enough money to hire enough people. So they are concentrating on raising awareness of the issue and persuading people to work on it, respectively contribute money to SI.

The real problem I see is the lack of formalized problems. I perceive it to be very important to formalize some actual problems. Doing so will aid raising money and allow others to work on the problems. To be more specific, I don't think that writing a book on rationality is worth the time it takes to do so when it is written by one of a few people who might be capable of formalizing some important problems. Especially since there are already many books on rationality. Even if Eliezer Yudkowsky is able to put everything the world knows about rationality together in a concise manner, that's nothing that will impress the important academics enough to actually believe him on AI issues. He should have rather written a book on decision theory where he seems to have some genuine ideas.