Our first cohort of OpenAI Fellows has concluded, with each Fellow going from a machine learning beginner to core OpenAI contributor in the course of a 6-month apprenticeship.

We’ve discovered that the gradient noise scale, a simple statistical metric, predicts the parallelizability of neural network training on a wide range of tasks. Since complex tasks tend to have noisier gradients, increasingly large batch sizes are likely to become useful in the future, removing one potential limit to further growth of AI systems. More broadly, these results show that neural network training need not be considered a mysterious art, but can be rigorized and systematized.

We’re releasing CoinRun, a training environment which provides a metric for an agent’s ability to transfer its experience to novel situations and has already helped clarify a longstanding puzzle in reinforcement learning. CoinRun strikes a desirable balance in complexity: the environment is simpler than traditional platformer games like Sonic the Hedgehog but still poses a worthy generalization challenge for state of the art algorithms.

We’re releasing Spinning Up in Deep RL, an educational resource designed to let anyone learn to become a skilled practitioner in deep reinforcement learning. Spinning Up consists of crystal-clear examples of RL code, educational exercises, documentation, and tutorials.

We’ve developed an energy-based model that can quickly learn to identify and generate instances of concepts, such as near, above, between, closest, and furthest, expressed as sets of 2d points. Our model learns these concepts after only five demonstrations. We also show cross-domain transfer: we use concepts learned in a 2d particle environment to solve tasks on a 3-dimensional physics-based robot.

We’ve developed Random Network Distillation (RND), a prediction-based method for encouraging reinforcement learning agents to explore their environments through curiosity, which for the first time exceeds average human performance on Montezuma’s Revenge.

We’re proposing an AI safety technique called iterated amplification that lets us specify complicated behaviors and goals that are beyond human scale, by demonstrating how to decompose a task into simpler sub-tasks, rather than by providing labeled data or a reward function. Although this idea is in its very early stages and we have only completed experiments on simple toy algorithmic domains, we’ve decided to present it in its preliminary state because we think it could prove to be a scalable approach to AI safety.

We are now accepting applications for our second cohort of OpenAI Scholars, a program where we provide 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 are now accepting applications for OpenAI Fellows and Interns for 2019.

Our first cohort of OpenAI Scholars has now completed the program.

OpenAI Five lost two games against top Dota 2 players at The International in Vancouver this week, maintaining a good chance of winning for the first 20–35 minutes of both games.

Yesterday, OpenAI Five won a best-of-three against a team of 99.95th percentile Dota players: Blitz, Cap, Fogged, Merlini, and MoonMeander—four of whom have played Dota professionally—in front of a live audience and 100,000 concurrent livestream viewers.

We’ve trained a human-like robot hand to manipulate physical objects with unprecedented dexterity.

Our first class of OpenAI Scholars is underway, and you can now follow along as this group of experienced software developers becomes machine learning practitioners.

The OpenAI Five Benchmark match is now over!