MIRI's 2024 End-of-Year Update

MIRI’s 2024 End-of-Year Update - Machine Intelligence Research Institute 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 Skip to content 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 MIRI’s 2024 End-of-Year Update

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 December 2, 2024 
 
 

 
 
 
 Alex Vermeer 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 MIRI is a nonprofit research organization with a mission of addressing the most serious hazards posed by smarter-than-human artificial intelligence. In our general strategy update and communications strategy update earlier this year, we announced a new strategy that we’re executing on at MIRI, and several new teams we’re spinning up as a result. This post serves as a status update on where things stand at MIRI today.

 We originally planned to run a formal fundraiser this year, our first one since 2019. However, we find ourselves with just over two years of reserves, which is more than we’ve typically had in our past fundraisers.

 Instead, we’ve written this brief update post, discussing recent developments at MIRI, projects that are in the works, and our basic funding status. In short: We aren’t in urgent need of more funds, but we do have a fair amount of uncertainty about what the funding landscape looks like now that MIRI is pursuing a very different strategy than we have in the past. Donations and expressions of donor interest may be especially useful over the next few months, to help us get a sense of how easy it will be to grow and execute on our new plans.

 You can donate via our Donate page, or get in touch with us here . For more details, read on.

 

 
 About MIRI 

 
 Funding Status 

 

-->

 

 About MIRI

 For most of MIRI’s 24-year history, our focus has been on a set of technical challenges: “How could one build AI systems that are far smarter than humans, without causing an extinction-grade catastrophe?”

 Over the last few years, we’ve come to the conclusion that this research, both at MIRI and in the larger field, has gone far too slowly to prevent disaster. Although we continue to support some AI alignment research efforts, we now believe that absent an international government effort to suspend frontier AI research, an extinction-level catastrophe is extremely likely .

 As a consequence, our new focus is on informing policymakers and the general public about the dire situation, and attempting to mobilize a response.

 
 
 Learn more:

 
 For a basic overview of why AI progress poses such an extreme risk, see Will Superintelligent AI End the World? (short TED talk) and AGI Ruin (longer explainer).

 For an overview of what’s changed at MIRI and what we’ve been working on, see our 2024 Mission and Strategy Update and our 2024 Communications Strategy .

 For more resources, check out our Media and Research pages, or subscribe to our monthly Newsletter .

 
 
 
 We began to scale back our alignmen

... (truncated, 7 KB total)