Meaning Alignment Institute: Year in Review

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Dec 29, 2023

We’re a non-profit supported by generous donors like you.

2023 was a great first year for MAI 🚀

We started 2023 by launching our vision for the future with the two video talks ‘Rebuilding Society on Meaning’ and ‘Exit the Void’. That work laid the foundations to our inception.

But this year we’ve done much more than just envisioning a more meaningful future. We’ve started building the first technical foundations for it:

We’ve developed a Values Elicitation Chatbot, a version of GPT-4, that interviews people and makes “Values Cards” out of their meaningful stories. You’ll be able to try it out soon on the GPT store!
In partnership with OpenAI, we’ve built the first values-centric governance process, in which people come together, use the values elicitation chatbot to collectively create a moral graph of what they think the wisest values are for a certain choice. We ran the process with 500 representative Americans and identified bridging values on controversial topics like abortion, and got extraordinarily promising first results. We think this a very important first step for the future of values aligned institutions.
We’ve created and run an early prototype of a Meaning Economy, in which participants articulated values cards, and were matched to do meaningful activities together. People loved the prototype so far — we’ll share more soon!

Next year, we’ll continue building towards a meaning-centric future. We have several projects in the pipeline.

First, we’ll continue setting the foundations for a future of values-aligned, wise AI by:

Publishing an academic paper on our work on Moral Graphs and values alignment.
Fine-tuning models on an expanded moral graph, comparing the resulting model with one fine-tuned using RLHF / Constitutional AI.
Researching models that can build & expand their own values through moral self-play, in a way such that weaker systems can understand and endorse the upgrades.

But also, this year we’ll finally have more ways for the community to be more involved:

We’re establishing a network of cross-disciplinary researchers that will together shape the emerging fields we’re currently calling Wise AI and Big-Data Virtue Ethics. We’re working on drafting research projects that we’ll announce next year — stay tuned to see how you can get involved.
We’ll be rolling out an event format people can try with their friends and communities to get in touch with their values and contribute to creating the universe of meaning.

And we’ll have a few more surprises that will be announced next year. We’re just getting started!

Joe, Ellie and Oliver

We’re a non-profit supported by generous donors like you.