In July 2016, OpenAI published a blog post titled "Special Projects" that outlined four key problem areas the organization deemed critical for both advancing AI and managing its long-term societal impact. Co-authored by Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman—figures who would go on to shape the modern artificial intelligence landscape—the post sought to recruit machine learning experts to lead these efforts.\n\nThe first project focused on detecting covert AI breakthroughs. The authors warned that as resources poured into AI research, the probability of an undisclosed, covert AI breakthrough would rise, creating risks of malicious use. To counter this, they proposed developing methods to detect such systems by monitoring external signals like global news, financial markets, and online games.\n\nThe second project aimed to build an agent capable of winning online programming competitions, noting that a program capable of writing other programs would be extremely powerful. The third project addressed cyber-security defense, proposing AI-driven techniques to defend against sophisticated hackers who themselves leverage machine learning. Finally, the fourth project envisioned a complex simulation populated by numerous long-lived agents that could interact, learn over time, discover language, and accomplish diverse goals.
In July 2016, OpenAI published a blog post titled 'Special Projects' that outlined four key problem areas the organization deemed critical.