Evaluator · round one
Founder of MIRI and of LessWrong; co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
$8.36M of Eliezer's recommendations funded
$4.32M granted through Eliezer's order
Eliezer Yudkowsky is the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and is widely regarded as a founding researcher of AI alignment. He coined the term "friendly AI" and spent two decades making the case that smarter-than-human AI poses an existential risk, long before the idea entered the mainstream. In 2009 he founded LessWrong, which grew into the main online hub of the rationalist community. His research covers decision theory and the technical foundations of alignment.
Eliezer is one of the Survival and Flourishing Fund's Speculation Granters, who make fast, early-stage grants to promising projects.
In 2025 he co-authored the New York Times bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Nate Soares. His earlier books include Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Inadequate Equilibria, and the novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. His 2023 Time essay calling for a worldwide halt to large AI training runs helped bring AI risk into public debate, and he has given a TED talk and appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast.
