Machine Intelligence Research Institute — General support (2017)
Open Philanthropy, October 16, 2017
Abstract
The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $3,750,000 over three years to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) for general support. MIRI plans to use these funds for ongoing research and activities related to reducing potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, one of our focus areas.
This grant represents a renewal of and increase to our $500,000 grant recommendation to MIRI in 2016, which we made despite strong reservations about their research agenda, detailed here. In short, we saw value in MIRI’s work but decided not to recommend a larger grant at that time because we were unconvinced of the value of MIRI’s research approach to AI safety relative to other research directions, and also had difficulty evaluating the technical quality of their research output. Additionally, we felt a large grant might signal a stronger endorsement from us than was warranted at the time, particularly as we had not yet made many grants in this area.
