OpenAI News

We’re now accepting applications for the next cohort of OpenAI Fellows, a program which offers a compensated 6-month apprenticeship in AI research at OpenAI.

We’re releasing the full version of Gym Retro, a platform for reinforcement learning research on games. This brings our publicly-released game count from around 70 Atari games and 30 Sega games to over 1,000 games across a variety of backing emulators. We’re also releasing the tool we use to add new games to the platform.

We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had a 2-year doubling period)[^footnote-correction]. Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (a 2-year doubling period would yield only a 7x increase). Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress, so as long as this trend continues, it’s worth preparing for the implications of systems far outside today’s capabilities.

We’re proposing an AI safety technique which trains agents to debate topics with one another, using a human to judge who wins.

We’re releasing an experimental metalearning approach called Evolved Policy Gradients, a method that evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks. Agents trained with EPG can succeed at basic tasks at test time that were outside their training regime, like learning to navigate to an object on a different side of the room from where it was placed during training.

We’re launching a transfer learning contest that measures a reinforcement learning algorithm’s ability to generalize from previous experience.

On March 3rd, we hosted our first hackathon with 100 members of the artificial intelligence community.

We’ve developed a simple meta-learning algorithm called Reptile which works by repeatedly sampling a task, performing stochastic gradient descent on it, and updating the initial parameters towards the final parameters learned on that task. Reptile is the application of the Shortest Descent algorithm to the meta-learning setting, and is mathematically similar to first-order MAML (which is a version of the well-known MAML algorithm) that only needs black-box access to an optimizer such as SGD or Adam, with similar computational efficiency and performance.

We’re providing 6–10 stipends and mentorship to individuals from underrepresented groups to study deep learning full-time for 3 months and open-source a project.

We’re releasing eight simulated robotics environments and a Baselines implementation of Hindsight Experience Replay, all developed for our research over the past year. We’ve used these environments to train models which work on physical robots. We’re also releasing a set of requests for robotics research.

Come to OpenAI’s office in San Francisco’s Mission District for talks and a hackathon on Saturday, March 3rd.

We’re excited to welcome new donors to OpenAI.

We’ve co-authored a paper that forecasts how malicious actors could misuse AI technology, and potential ways we can prevent and mitigate these threats. This paper is the outcome of almost a year of sustained work with our colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Center for a New American Security, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others.