Two Giants of AI Team Up to Head Off the Robot Apocalypse

There's nothing new about worrying that superintelligent machines may endanger humanity, but the idea has lately become hard to avoid. A spurt of progress in artificial intelligence as well as comments by figures such as Bill Gates--who declared himself "in the camp that is concerned about superintelligence"--have given new traction to nightmare scenarios featuring supersmart software. Now two leading centers in the current AI boom are trying to bring discussion about the dangers of smart machines down to Earth. Google DeepMind, the unit behind the company's artificial Go champion, and OpenAI, the nonprofit lab funded in part by Tesla's Elon Musk, have teamed up to make practical progress on a problem they argue has attracted too many headlines and too few practical ideas: How do you make smart software that doesn't go rogue? "If you're worried about bad things happening, the best thing we can do is study the relatively mundane things that go wrong in AI systems today," says Dario Amodei, a curly-haired researcher on OpenAI's small team working on AI safety.