So far I've seen lots of press releases and credential waving, but no actual development plan or progress. Until they start publishing papers a la Google, I'm putting this in the vaporware basket.
Fortunately, we'll have our first batch of papers coming out soon. (We also released OpenAI Gym a few weeks ago, but that's supporting infrastructure rather than novel research.) Hopefully we'll be able to earn our way out of the basket afterwards :).
are you batching papers instead of releasing them when they're done?
That sounds a little harsh and I don't really mean in that way. Commercial AI/ML projects, since they have a clear goal they can measure against (play Go, drive a car, get better search results) tend to make meaningful progress that we can see, whereas the more philosophical and research-oriented non-profits don't have a yardstick like that, and probably won't until we have an inkling on how to actually make "strong AI". So this organization will probably seem like vaporware for some time, but hopefully it will prove its worth in the long run.
b) Also, unfair to MIRI. They are not only researching the area but also creating it. A lot of early work want into socializing AI risk as an idea, and in that sense pretty much every future effort in this area owes to them. I've given noticeable dollars to MIRI and pretty satisfied with ROI (of course always room for improvement), would do it again.
Even with concrete plans/objectives ML/DL/AI projects rarely live up to their hype. IMO An AGI project that isn't focused around observable learning models (eg, not around "consciousness" etc...) isn't going to make much progress.