Research Program

Summary

The core mission of SIAI is to develop a framework for safe advanced artificial intelligence. One of our paths toward this is research and software development. We have three aims with the SIAI Research Program:

  • Understand the problems underlying the creation of safe AI with powerful general intelligence.
  • Pursue in-house theoretical and experimental research to work directly toward safe advanced AI.
  • Provide the AI community at large with conceptual, mathematical, and software tools that they can use to move and accelerate their AI R&D work toward the direction of safe and beneficial general intelligence.

Our objectives are deliberately different in emphasis and focus than contemporary academic and industry AI research communities. Our program differs from a typical AI R&D program in two key respects:

  • Our focus on general intelligence, as opposed to narrow AI software, which is designed to solve specialized – albeit often complex – problems, such as chess-playing, flight, or fraud detection.
  • Our focus on safety and beneficial use. These qualities must be placed at the foundation of work on advanced AI, rather than tacked on at the end of the theory, design, and development process.