Protecting Against AI’s Existential Threat
By Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei,
Wall Street Journal
| 10. 18. 2017
How to avoid the nightmare scenario of artificial intelligence? According to researchers from Elon Musk’s OpenAI, the trick is teaching machines to keep our interests in mind
On July 8, 2017, an AI system built by our research company, OpenAI, beat a semipro human player in solo matches of a battle arena video game called Dota 2. One month later, the same AI system beat a professional gamer ranked in the top 50. Three days after that it defeated the No. 1 solo Dota 2 player in the world. And it kept getting better: The Aug. 11 version of our AI beat the Aug. 10 version 60% of the time. Our AI learned to trick its opponents, predict what it couldn’t see and decide when to fight and when to flee.
Keeping a Careful Eye on AI
How do you create AI that doesn’t pose a threat to humanity? By teaching it to work with humans. Open AI collaborated with DeepMind, Google’s AI division, to design a training method that incorporates regular human feedback. The idea is to “humanize” AI...
Related Articles
By Tania Fabo, Truthout | 02.28.2026
The reproductive tech company Orchid recently launched a genetic test that promises a whole genome sequencing report for embryos. It is the first such test commercially available to couples undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and claims to detect things like...
By Pete Shanks
| 02.27.2026
Last month, we published “The Shameful Legacy of Tuskegee” which focused on a proposed experiment in Guinea-Bissau. The study’s plan echoed the notorious Tuskegee disaster, withholding safe, effective vaccines against hepatitis B from some newborns while inoculating others. It was to be financed by the U.S. but performed by a controversial Danish team. That project provoked a multi-national outcry, leading to a remarkable response from the World Health Organization:
WHO has significant concerns regarding the study’s scientific...
By Jenn White, NPR | 02.26.2026
By Vittoria Vardanega, SWI swissinfo.ch | 02.13.2026
In recent years, sperm donation has produced family trees of unprecedented size, stretching across countries and, in some cases, continents. Stories of “mass donors” have captured public attention, most recently through the Netflix documentary series, The Man with 1,000 Kids...