Harlan

My beef with Anthropic I've long felt that while Anthropic is the most safety-conscious of the frontier AI companies, they're also the most hypocritical enablers of the whole reckless enterprise. By framing themselves as the "good sport" in the race, the one who's encouraging everyone else to "race them to...

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies * As we announced last month, Eliezer and Nate have a book coming out this September: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. This is MIRI’s major attempt to warn the policy world and the general public about AI. Preorders are live now, and are...

This is part of the MIRI Single Author Series. Pieces in this series represent the beliefs and opinions of their named authors, and do not claim to speak for all of MIRI. OpenAI recently added a new webpage to share the company’s views on AI safety and alignment. I appreciate...

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...

MIRI updates * Rob Bensinger suggests that AI risk discourse could be improved by adopting a new set of labels for different perspectives on existential risk from AI. One drawback of “AI doomer” (a label sometimes used in online discussions) is that it does not have a consistent meaning. *...

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...

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...