Eliezer Yudkowsky
AI safety researcher; co-founder, MIRI
Among the earliest and most prominent voices warning about risks from advanced AI. Writes at length on LessWrong, the forum he helped start.
Key arguments & positions
- Argues building superintelligence without solving alignment first will very likely be catastrophic, and does not believe current safety techniques scale.
- Advocates an international, verified moratorium on frontier AI training runs.
- Popularized foundational AI-safety concepts such as "coherent extrapolated volition."
Accomplishments
- Co-founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in 2000.
- Founded LessWrong in 2009.
- Co-authored the 2025 New York Times bestseller "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies."
Papers & key writings
- "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (2025, with Nate Soares)
- "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" (2004, MIRI)
Links
Timeline
- 2000Co-founds the institute that becomes MIRI.
- 2009Begins the Sequences on rationality, later collected as a free book.
- 2010Publishes Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
- 2022Publishes "AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities".
- 2023Argues in TIME for an international halt to frontier training runs.
In the library
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