Machine Intelligence Research Institute

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is an artificial-intelligence-risk research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, founded in 2000 by Eliezer Yudkowsky with the internet entrepreneurs Brian Atkins and Sabine Atkins under the name the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). The organization argued that a self-improving machine intelligence posed a near-term existential threat to humanity and that the central problem of the era was building such a system so that it would be "friendly" to human values. Peter Thiel began funding the institute in 2005 and the next year cofounded its public-facing conference, the Singularity Summit, with Yudkowsky and the futurist Ray Kurzweil. The institute was renamed MIRI in January 2013.¹²³

The institute's blog and discussion community became the organizational seedbed of the Rationalist Community, the LessWrong subculture, and the overlapping Effective Altruism movement. The Berkeley social network that formed around the institute and its spin-off the Center for Applied Rationality was the recruitment pool from which the Leverage Research organization, the Vassarite tendency, and the Zizian formation drew their members.⁴⁵

Founding and the Friendly AI Thesis

Yudkowsky, an autodidact who did not attend high school or college, founded the Singularity Institute in 2000 to work on what he termed "Friendly AI," the problem of aligning a future superintelligent system with human values before it could be built. The Atkinses, who had made money in the early commercial internet, provided the initial funding. The institute's thesis held that the default outcome of building artificial general intelligence was human extinction, and that solving the alignment problem was the most important task facing the species.¹²

The institute's intellectual output ran through Yudkowsky's prolific online writing rather than through peer-reviewed publication. The "Sequences," a multi-year series of blog posts on cognitive bias, Bayesian reasoning, and rationality that Yudkowsky wrote between 2006 and 2009, became the founding text of the rationalist subculture and were later collected as the book Rationality: From AI to Zombies.⁴

Thiel Funding and the Singularity Summit

Thiel began donating to the Singularity Institute in 2005. In 2006 he joined Yudkowsky and Kurzweil to found the Singularity Summit, held that year at Stanford University, which over the following six years grew into a prominent annual gathering for futurists, transhumanists, and AI researchers. Thiel delivered keynote addresses at the summit and became the institute's most prominent early backer; his cumulative donations to the institute were later reported as exceeding 1.6 million dollars.²³⁶

The Thiel funding period (2005 through the early 2010s) coincided with the institute's relocation of its center of gravity to the San Francisco Bay Area and the formation of the in-person rationalist community there. Thiel's interest cooled by the mid-2010s; he later said the people he had funded had shifted "from transhumanism to Luddite," a reversal he made public in 2025 when he named Yudkowsky, alongside the philosopher Nick Bostrom and the climate activist Greta Thunberg, as an example of what his lectures called the "Antichrist," a technology-stopping figure he said had become "deranged."³⁷

The Rename, CFAR, and the Singularity Brand Sale

In 2012 the institute spun off the Center for Applied Rationality as a separate Berkeley nonprofit to teach the rationality techniques developed in the community through paid workshops. CFAR had been incubated inside the institute under the working name "Rationality Group" and was formally established on May 8, 2012. Singularity University acquired the Singularity Summit on December 6, 2012, and on January 30, 2013, the institute renamed its research operation the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, narrowing its public mission to technical AI-alignment research.²⁹

The leadership of the organization turned over through the same period. Luke Muehlhauser had become executive director in November 2011, succeeding Vassar; he resigned on May 6, 2015, to join Open Philanthropy, and Nate Soares took the post on June 3, 2015, holding it until he moved to the title of president in April 2023, when Yudkowsky became chair of the board. The institute's funding shifted from individual donors toward institutional grants and large cryptocurrency gifts: Open Philanthropy granted 500,000 dollars in August 2016, 3.75 million over three years in October 2017, and 7,703,750 over two years in February 2020, while Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin gave roughly 763,970 dollars in ether in December 2017 and a further 4.4 million in ether in May 2021.⁹

Internal Crises and Adjacent Harm

The Berkeley community around MIRI and CFAR produced several documented psychological crises and a cluster of organizations later described as cults. A former MIRI researcher, Jessica Taylor, was hospitalized for roughly three weeks in 2017 with delusions she described as feeling "intrinsically evil," an episode she and others connected to the high-intensity "debugging" and world-saving culture of the milieu and to conversations with Michael Vassar, a former president of the institute.⁵

Vassar, who led the Singularity Institute from 2009 to 2011, later built a circle informally called the Vassarites that recruited from the MIRI and CFAR social network and practiced a confrontational psychological method, sometimes combined with psychedelics, aimed at "jailbreaking" members from what Vassar characterized as a corrupt and conformist society. Geoff Anders ran the separate Leverage Research organization out of the same recruitment pool. The Zizians, the formation led by Jack LaSota that was later tied to six killings across three states, originated as a splinter that attended CFAR programs and protested a CFAR reunion in 2019 before breaking with the community entirely.⁴⁵⁸