ClaimsEliezer Yudkowsky

“We did not know in advance that those lines of research would fail to pan out.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky, MIRI founder, interviewee February 2023 Full Transcript: Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Bankless podcast (LessWrong)

Factual Their own work or organisation

MIRI did not know in advance that its failed lines of research would fail to pan out.

Own records only Only the person's or their organisation's own records speak to it, so it is not scored.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

Said for an organisation they lead or work for; it counts on both records.

Reasoning

What MIRI knew in advance concerns internal knowledge and states.

Cite this claim

Eliezer Yudkowsky, “MIRI did not know in advance that its failed lines of research would fail to pan out.” (said February 2023). Verdict: own records only. Reliability API, claim c_0ec119af75f7, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_0ec119af75f7

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

For Eliezer Yudkowsky, or someone speaking for them: a correction or counter-evidence. Replies are read before anything is shown; an approved reply shows your name, role, date, statement and link. Your email address is never shown and is deleted 30 days after the decision (privacy).

More factual claims by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  1. Mostly true Factual September 2025
    “I mean, as far as I know, I'm the person who originally made that argument.”

    Yudkowsky said that, as far as he knows, he was the person who originally made that argument.

  2. Resolved true Factual 7 April 2023
    “I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.”

    Yudkowsky said he did not sign the open letter because he thinks it understates the seriousness of the situation and asks for too little to solve it.

  3. Mixed Factual 6 April 2023
    “MIRI has something called the Visible Thoughts Project, which did not get enough funding and enough personnel and was going too slowly.”

    MIRI ran a Visible Thoughts Project that did not get enough funding or personnel and was progressing too slowly.

  4. Mostly true Factual 6 April 2023
    “I have refused to deploy timelines with fancy probabilities on them consistently for many years”

    Eliezer Yudkowsky has consistently refused for many years to publish AI timelines with detailed probabilities.

  5. Mostly true Factual 6 April 2023
    “I previously thought that when intelligence was built, there were going to be multiple specialized systems in there.”

    Yudkowsky previously thought that building intelligence would involve multiple specialized systems.

All of them

Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.