Teaching AI systems to behave themselves

By Cade Metz SAN FRANCISCO: At OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, machines are teaching themselves to behave like humans. But sometimes, this goes wrong. Sitting inside OpenAI's San Francisco offices on a recent afternoon, the researcher Dario Amodei showed off an autonomous system that taught itself to play Coast Runners, an old boat-racing video game. The winner is the boat with the most points that also crosses the finish line. The result was surprising: The boat was far too interested in the little green widgets that popped up on the screen.