OpenAI's 2016 Wishlist: Detect Secret AI Breakthroughs and Build a Champion Programming Agent
Special Projects (2016)
In a 2016 post, OpenAI listed four problem areas it deemed critical for AI's advancement and societal impact: detecting covert breakthrough AI systems used maliciously, building an agent to win online programming competitions, defending against AI-powered cyberattacks, and creating a complex simulation with many long-lived agents that learn and discover language. The post invited machine learning experts to apply to tackle these challenges at OpenAI.
As the number of organizations and resources allocated to AI research increases, the probability increases that an organization will make an undisclosed AI breakthrough and use the system for potentially malicious ends.
- samayashar
The secret to success for OpenAI, Anthropic and labs is the vision that they saw 10 years back and kept working on it. We're in awe of how models like GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 are performing today, but it's important to understand that they've been working on this before we knew about AI.
The next big thing is Robots and some stealth company building today is going to be a trillion-dollar giant in few years time.
- Kuyawa
Ten years ago I didn't know AI existed, it was a term for the future. Now is the future they built for us. Thank you guys, all of you, whether people love you or hate you it is undeniable the progress you have unleashed for the benefit of mankind and history will be grateful about your legacy
- yorwba
Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181881 (235 points, 197 comments)
- jmathai
> Build an agent to win online programming competitions. A program that can write other programs would be, for obvious reasons, very powerful.
Interesting that Anthropic led the way here.
- codeulike
A complex simulation with many long-lived agents: We’re interested in building a very large simulation with lots of different agents in it that can interact with each other, learn over a long period of time, discover language, and accomplish a rich variety of goals.
This sounds rather like the plot to Greg Egan's "Crystal Nights" (2008)