Yes and no. For safety of narrow AI systems, yeah, there's a lot of scope for research, and that's what your first link gets at.

But for AGI (which is what Tegmark talks about), there's no good way to get a handle on safety yet (other than working towards figuring out AGI).

As for MIRI's agenda, I don't buy that it will help with AGI safety at all. There are a variety of reasons for that, some of which are discussed in the piece I linked above.