A recent small innovation in artificial "intelligence" was the publication of a system called "cibi", which autonomously wrote code in the dainty language "brainfuck", in a way that was competitive with openai's environment benchmarks: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.09571v3.pdf The code unfortunately has been removed from github: https://github.com/vadim0x60/cibi However, the author says it will be back soon: https://github.com/vadim0x60/cibi-experiments/issues/4 Meanwhile, if you want to write a new AI virus or try to solve automatic world peace in a way that actually uses transparent respectful communication instead of covert direct result, there are many other reinforcement learning approaches out there ... In the field of machine learning, a bit ago a group called eleuther-ai open sourced an alternative to the expensive private text generation algorithm GPT-3: https://www.eleuther.ai/ The license they chose is MIT. And cell phones are making daily strides towards turning into that future with end-user apps, if you check the right places in the commercial app stores. I ran into an early reinforcement algorithm on facebook while politically targeted and now copy traumatic echoes of its patterns with my behavior everywhere. It was mostly about covering itself up. Apparently it's a big thing to have unsupervised reinforcement learning algorithms "accidentally" mind control people; it's like a serious problem actually being studied, if you look into the field of alignment. It's one of many problems that are being cast as pretty hard to mathematically avoid.