CEO at Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
Malo(Malo Bourgon)
Karma: 1,060
MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy Update
MIRI’s 2018 Fundraiser
MIRI’s 2019 Fundraiser
Article about LW: Faith, Hope, and Singularity: Entering the Matrix with New York’s Futurist Set
Given Nate’s comment: “This change is in large part an enshrinement of the status quo. Malo’s been doing a fine job running MIRI day-to-day for many many years (including feats like acquiring a rural residence for all staff who wanted to avoid cities during COVID, and getting that venue running smoothly). In recent years, morale has been low and I, at least, haven’t seen many hopeful paths before us.” (Bold emphases are mine). Do you see the first bold sentence as being in conflict with the second, at all? If morale is low, why do you see that as an indicator that the status quo should remain in place?
A few things seem relevant here when it comes to morale:
I think, on average, folks at MIRI are pretty pessimistic about humanity’s chances of avoiding AI x-risk, and overall I think the situation has felt increasingly dire over the past few years to most of us.
Nate and Eliezer lost hope in the research directions they were most optimistic about, and haven’t found any new angles of attack in the research space that they have much hope in.
Nate and Eliezer very much wear their despair on their sleeve so to speak, and I think it’s been rough for an org like MIRI to have that much sleeve-despair coming from both its chief executive and founder.
During my time as COO over the last ~7 years, I’ve increasingly taken on more and more of the responsibility traditionally associated at most orgs with the senior leadership position. So when Nate says “This change is in large part an enshrinement of the status quo. Malo’s been doing a fine job running MIRI day-to-day for many many years […]” (emphasis mine), this is what he’s pointing at. However, he was definitely still the one in charge, and therefore had a significant impact on the org’s internal culture, narrative, etc.
While he has many strengths, I think I’m stronger in (and better suited to) some management and people leadership stuff. As such, I’m hopeful that in the senior leadership position (where I’ll be much more directly responsible for steering our culture etc.), I’ll be able to “rally the troops” so to speak in a way that Nate didn’t have as much success with, especially in these dire times.
It would be nice to have a transcript of the vows as well, some of them were really good.
This was my favourite:
Do you vow to reveal all your concerns about your relationship—as they appear to you—despite all embarrassment and fear; so that if the other stays silent you may trust that there is nothing to be said.
I am inclined to agree with your first request about not rewarding reporting like this with increased page rank. As such I won’t re-add the link.
However, I’m having trouble understanding why a discussion about a portrayal of LW in the media isn’t something worth discussing here.
MIRI’s 2017 Fundraiser
Update: Added an announcement of our newest hire, Edward Kmett, as well as a list of links to relatively recent work we’ve been doing in Agent Foundations, and updated the post to reflect the fact that Giving Tuesday is over (though our matching opportunity continues)!
Sometimes quick org updates about team changes can be a little dry. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I expect you’ll find the next post more interesting :)
(Edit: fixed typo)
MIRI’s 2017 Fundraiser
FWIW, I approached Gretta about starting to help out with comms related stuff at MIRI, i.e., it wasn’t Eliezer’s idea.
My read was that his comment was in response to this part at the end of the post:
There’s a lot more we hope to say about our new (and still evolving) strategy, and about our general thinking on the world’s (generally very dire) situation. But I don’t want those announcements to further delay sharing the above updates, so I’ve factored our 2023 strategy updates into multiple posts, beginning with this one.
MIRI is still trying to decide on the best attack plan. Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Here’s some relevant data that I’ve collected:
Scheduled donations don’t count for any of the hourly matches/prizes.
There is no limit to how many times one person can donate.
“Individual gift” means a single donation by a donor.
We will be able to see when golden tickets are won in real time.
We will only find out who much matching we got at the end of each hour.
There will be a leaderboard “displaying the top raising nonprofits and those with the most individual donors”.
I’m still waiting to find out about whether we’ll be able do see over all totals.
Transaction fees for non-profits such as MIRI on PayPal are 2.2% + $0.30, and the processing is automated with our donor database solution so it’s definitely net positive :)
I asked about this. All scheduled donations don’t count towards any of the matching/prizes, so scheduling a donation is not recommended.
Does MIRI need any help? (Or perhaps more precisely “Does MIRI need any help from the right kind of person with the right kind of skills, and if so, what would that person or those skills look like?”)
Yes, I expect to be hiring in the comms department relatively soon but have not actually posted any job listings yet. I will post to LessWrong about it when I do.
That said, I’d be excited for folks who think they might have useful background or skills to contribute and would be excited to work at MIRI, to reach out and let us know they exist, or pitch us on why they might be a good addition to the team.
Unfortunately the program has been discontinued by Capital One :(
We have it in our queue to look into alternatives.
One thing you might want to look into is that many cards will allow you to donate your reward points etc. to charity. For many credit cards, this generates more value for the charity you choose to donate to.
Yes.
The reason is that we have no real data about how many donations in any given hour will be enough to win the $2,000. So the trade off we decided to take is to increase our likelihood of winning a few hours, at the expense of having an even distribution over more hours. Since I’m happier to win a few by a landslide, than loose all of them by a hair. Also, more practically, coordinating the latter approach is much more difficult on a large scale.
I’m sure there are ways to do that, but very few people know how to use those tools.
As for MIRI staff staying up there are other reasons to do so, such as monitoring the giving patterns of other orgs, and monitor our attempts to win matching and coordinate those individuals.
(Also FWIW, I think you could have made the suggestion about automating the process, which is a great and helpful idea, in a much nicer and constructive fashion.)