“Research Agenda: Synthesizing Standalone World-Models (+ Bounties, + Seeking Funding)” by Thane Ruthenis
Description
tl;dr: I outline my research agenda, post bounties for poking holes in it or for providing general relevant information, and am seeking to diversify my funding sources. This post will be followed by several others, providing deeper overviews of the agenda's subproblems and my sketches of how to tackle them.
Back at the end of 2023, I wrote the following:
I'm fairly optimistic about arriving at a robust solution to alignment via agent-foundations research in a timely manner. (My semi-arbitrary deadline is 2030, and I expect to arrive at intermediate solid results by EOY 2025.)
On the inside view, I'm pretty satisfied with how that is turning out. I have a high-level plan of attack which approaches the problem from a novel route, and which hopefully lets us dodge a bunch of major alignment difficulties (chiefly the instability of value reflection, which I am MIRI-tier skeptical of tackling directly). [...]
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Outline:
(04:34 ) Why Do You Consider This Agenda Promising?
(06:35 ) High-Level Outline
(07:03 ) Theoretical Justifications
(15:41 ) Subproblems
(19:48 ) Bounties
(21:20 ) Funding
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
September 22nd, 2025
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
United States
