Special Projects (2016)

OpenAI's 2016 "Special Projects" initiative focused on impactful scientific work, identifying key problem areas for advancing AI and its societal impact. One crucial area involves detecting the use of covert breakthrough AI systems, especially as more organizations engage in AI research. This detection could involve monitoring news, financial markets, and online games. Another project aimed to build complex simulations with numerous long-lived agents capable of interaction, learning, language discovery, and achieving diverse goals.

This 2016 document from OpenAI is notable for its early focus on detecting covert breakthrough AI systems, a concern that has only grown more prominent in recent years.