In 2016, engineers at OpenAI spent months teaching artificial intelligence systems to play video games. Or, to be more precise, they spent months watching their AI agents learn to play video games. This was back in the days before artificial intelligence was a subject of nonstop hype and anxiety. OpenAI had been founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other tech savants just a year before and still operated more like a think tank than like the tech colossus it was to become. The researchers were