Timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute

This is a timeline of Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is a nonprofit organization that does work related to AI safety.

Sample questions
This is an experimental section that provides some sample questions for readers, similar to reading questions that might come with a book. Some readers of this timeline might come to the page aimlessly and might not have a good idea of what they want to get out of the page. Having some "interesting" questions can help in reading the page with more purpose and in getting a sense of why the timeline is an important tool to have.

The following are some interesting questions that can be answered by reading this timeline:


 * Which Singularity Summits did MIRI host, and when did they happen? (Sort by the "Event type" column and look at the rows labeled "Conference".)
 * What was MIRI up to for the first ten years of its existence (before Luke Muehlhauser joined, before Holden Karnofsky wrote his critique of the organization)? (Scan the years 2000–2009.)
 * How has MIRI's explicit mission changed over the years? (Sort by the "Event type" column and look at the rows labeled "Mission".)

The following are some interesting questions that are difficult or impossible to answer just by reading the current version of this timeline, but might be possible to answer using a future version of this timeline:


 * When did some big donations to MIRI take place (for instance, the one by Peter Thiel)?
 * Has MIRI "done more things" between 2010–2013 or between 2014–2017? (More information)

Wikipedia desktop pageviews across the different names
The image below shows desktop pageviews of the page and its predecessor pages, "Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence" and "Singularity Institute". The change in names occurred on these dates:


 * December 23, 2011: Two pages "Singularity Institute" and "Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence" merged into single page "Singularty Institute for Artificial Intelligence"
 * April 16, 2012: Page moved from "Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence" to "Singularity Institute" with the old name redirecting to the new name
 * February 1, 2013: Page moved from "Singularity Institute" to "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" with both old names redirecting to the new name

The red vertical line (for June 2015) represents a change in the method of estimating pageviews; specifically, pageviews by bots and spiders are excluded for months on the right of the line.



How the timeline was built
The initial version of the timeline was written by Issa Rice.

Issa likes to work locally and track changes with Git, so the revision history on this wiki only shows changes in bulk. To see more incremental changes, refer to the commit history.

is available.

Feedback and comments
Feedback for the timeline can be provided at the following places:


 * LessWrong link post
 * Timelines Wiki Facebook Group
 * Vipul Naik's share of the timeline

What the timeline is still missing

 * TODO Figure out how to cover publications
 * TODO mention kurzweil
 * TODO maybe include some of the largest donations (e.g. the XRP/ETH ones, tallinn, thiel)
 * TODO maybe fundraisers
 * TODO look more closely through some AMAs: ,
 * TODO maybe more info in this SSC post
 * TODO more links at EA Wikia page
 * TODO lots of things from strategy updates, annual reviews, etc.
 * TODO Ben Goertzel talks about his involvement with MIRI, also more on opencog
 * TODO giant thread on Ozy's blog
 * NOTE From 2017-07-06: "years that have few events so far: 2003 (one event), 2007 (one event), 2008 (three events), 2010 (three events), 2017 (three events)"
 * TODO possibly include more from the old MIRI volunteers site. Some of the volunteering opportunities like proofreading and promoting MIRI by giving it good web of trust ratings seem to give a good flavor of what MIRI was like, the specific challenges in terms of switching domains, and so on.
 * TODO cover Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI), kinda a successor to MIRI volunteers?
 * TODO cover launch of Center for Human-Compatible AI
 * TODO not sure how exactly to include this in the timeline, but something about MIRI's changing approach to funding certain types of contract work. e.g. Vipul says "I believe the work I did with Luke would no longer be sponsored by MIRI as their research agenda is now much more narrowly focused on the mathematical parts."
 * TODO who is Tyler Emerson?
 * modal combat and some other domains:, ,
 * https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yGZHQYqWkLMbXy3z7/video-q-and-a-with-singularity-institute-executive-director
 * https://intelligence.org/2012/01/12/qa-2-with-luke-muehlhauser-singularity-institute-executive-director/

Timeline update strategy
Some places to look on the MIRI blog:


 * MIRI strategy posts
 * News posts
 * Newsletters

Also general stuff like big news coverage.