News and links

• The Open Philanthropy Project and OpenAI begin a partnership: Holden Karnofsky joins Elon Musk and Sam Altman on OpenAI’s Board of Directors, and Open Philanthropy contributes $30M to OpenAI’s research program.
• Open Philanthropy has also awarded $2M to the Future of Humanity Institute.
• Modeling Agents with Probabilistic Programs: a new book by Owain Evans, Andreas Stuhlmüller, John Salvatier, and Daniel Filan.
• New from OpenAI: “Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning“; “Learning to Communicate“; “One-Shot Imitation Learning“; and from Paul Christiano, “Benign Model-Free RL.”
• Chris Olah and Shan Carter discuss research debt as an obstacle to clear thinking and the transmission of ideas, and propose Distill as a solution.
• Andrew Trask proposes encrypting deep learning algorithms during training.
• Roman Yampolskiy seeks submissions for a book on AI safety and security.
• 80,000 Hours has updated their problem profile on positively shaping the development of AI, a solid introduction to AI risk — which 80K now ranks as the most urgent problem in the world. See also 80K’s write-up on in-demand skill sets at effective altruism oragnizations.