Our guest in this episode is Nate Soares, President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI.

MIRI was founded in 2000 as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky, with support from a couple of internet entrepreneurs. Among other things, it ran a series of conferences called the Singularity Summit. In 2012, Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, acquired the Singularity Summit, including the Singularity brand, and the Institute was renamed as MIRI.

Nate joined MIRI in 2014 after working as a software engineer at Google, and since then he’s been a key figure in the AI safety community. In a blogpost at the time he joined MIRI he observed “I turn my skills towards saving the universe, because apparently nobody ever got around to teaching me modesty.”

MIRI has long had a fairly pessimistic stance on whether AI alignment is possible. In this episode, we’ll explore what drives that view—and whether there is any room for hope.

Selected follow-ups:

• Nate Soares - MIRI
• Yudkowsky and Soares Announce Major New Book: “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” - MIRI
• The Bayesian model of probabilistic reasoning
• During safety testing, o1 broke out of its VM - Reddit
• Leo Szilard - Physics World
• David Bowie - Five Years - Old Grey Whistle Test
• Amara's Law - IEEE
• Robert Oppenheimer calculation of p(doom)
• JD Vance commenting on AI-2027
• SolidGoldMagikarp - LessWrong
• ASML
• Chicago Pile-1 - Wikipedia
• Castle Bravo - Wikipedia

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration