Note also that this work isn't just papers; e.g., as a matter of public record MIRI has submitted formal comments to regulators to inform draft regulation based on this work.
(For those less familiar, yes, such comments are indeed actually weirdly impactful in the American regulatory system).
I’ve heard MIRI has some big content projects in the works, maybe a book.
FWIW I think having a regular stream of lower-effort content that a somewhat mainstream audience consumes would help to bolster MIRI’s position as a thought leader when they release the bigger works.
Hi, I'm part of the communications team at MIRI. Here's a very high-level summary of what MIRI is currently doing:
MIRI's strategy update from earlier this year explains the reasoning behind our shift from primarily doing technical alignment research to focusing more on communications and policy. The actual work of making that shift is a lot of why 2024 looked quieter, from the outside, than 2023 (and than our hopes for 2025).
MIRI's communications strategy update published in May explained what they were planning on working on. I emailed them a month or so ago and they said they are continuing to work on the things in that blog post. They are the sorts of things that can take longer than a year so I'm not surprised that they haven't released anything substantial in the way of comms this year.
"Our objective is to convince major powers to shut down the development of frontier AI systems worldwide"
This?
As of EoY 2022, MIRI has 11 people on payroll, assets of about $20M and a lot of mindshare. Its mission is stated as follows on the most recent tax filing I can find:
"To ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive impact. thus, the charitable purpose of the organization is to:
a) perform research relevant to ensuring that smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive impact;
b) raise awareness of this important issue;
c) advise researchers, leasers and laypeople around the world;
d) as necessary, implement a smarter-than-human intelligence with humane, stable goals. "
The website lists a workshop from 2018 and some papers from 2015. There are also some papers from 2020-2021.
What is MIRI currently (or at least over the past 12 months) doing to fulfill these goals? (This is not intended to be a hostile question, just as a matter of fact what are MIRI doing/what have they done over the past 12 months)