After completing a study fellowship at MIRI that he began in late 2019, Blake Jones is joining the MIRI research team full-time! Blake joins MIRI after a long career working on low-level software systems such as the Solaris operating system and the Oracle database.
Other MIRI updates
- MIRI researcher Evan Hubinger goes on the FLI podcast (transcript/discussion, audio) to discuss “inner alignment, outer alignment, and proposals for building safe advanced AI”.
- A revised version of Vanessa Kosoy’s “Optimal Polynomial-Time Estimators: A Bayesian Notion of Approximation Algorithm,” co-authored with Alex Appel, has been accepted to the Journal of Applied Logics.
- From MIRI researcher Abram Demski: Dutch-Booking CDT: Revised Argument argues that “causal” theories (ones using counterfactuals to evaluate expected value) must behave the same as theories using conditional probabilities. Relating HCH and Logical Induction discusses amplification in the context of reflective oracles. And Radical Probabilism reviews the surprising gap between Dutch-book arguments and Bayes' rule.
News and links
- Alex Flint summarizes the Center for Human-Compatible AI's assistance games research program.
- CHAI’s Andrew Critch and MILA’s David Krueger release “AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety (ARCHES)”, a review of 29 AI (existential) safety research directions, each with an illustrative analogy, examples of current work and potential synergies between research directions, and discussion of ways the research approach might lower (or raise) existential risk.
- OpenAI’s Danny Hernandez and Tom Brown present evidence that “for AI tasks with high levels of recent investment, algorithmic progress has yielded more gains than classical hardware efficiency”.
- DeepMind's Victoria Krakovna shares her takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic for slow-takeoff scenarios.
- AI Impacts’ Daniel Kokotajlo discusses possible changes the world might undergo before reaching AGI.
- 80,000 Hours describes careers they view as promising but haven’t written up as priority career paths, including information security (previously discussed here).
The post July 2020 Newsletter appeared first on Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
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July 17, 2020 at 06:40AM by Rob Bensinger, Khareem Sudlow
