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.

We’ve designed a method that encourages AIs to teach each other with examples that also make sense to humans. Our approach automatically selects the most informative examples to teach a concept—for instance, the best images to describe the concept of dogs—and experimentally we found our approach to be effective at teaching both AIs

We’ve built a system for automatically figuring out which object is meant by a word by having a neural network decide if the word belongs to each of about 100 automatically-discovered “types” (non-exclusive categories).

We’re releasing a new batch of seven unsolved problems which have come up in the course of our research at OpenAI.

We’re releasing highly-optimized GPU kernels for an underexplored class of neural network architectures: networks with block-sparse weights. Depending on the chosen sparsity, these kernels can run orders of magnitude faster than cuBLAS or cuSPARSE. We’ve used them to attain state-of-the-art results in text sentiment analysis and generative modeling of text and images.

We’ve developed a hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm that learns high-level actions useful for solving a range of tasks, allowing fast solving of tasks requiring thousands of timesteps. Our algorithm, when applied to a set of navigation problems, discovers a set of high-level actions for walking and crawling in different directions, which enables the agent to master new navigation tasks quickly.

Our latest robotics techniques allow robot controllers, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on physical robots, to react to unplanned changes in the environment as they solve simple tasks. That is, we’ve used these techniques to build closed-loop systems rather than open-loop ones as before.

We’ve found that self-play allows simulated AIs to discover physical skills like tackling, ducking, faking, kicking, catching, and diving for the ball, without explicitly designing an environment with these skills in mind. Self-play ensures that the environment is always the right difficulty for an AI to improve. Taken alongside our Dota 2 self-play results, we have increasing confidence that self-play will be a core part of powerful AI systems in the future.

We show that for the task of simulated robot wrestling, a meta-learning agent can learn to quickly defeat a stronger non-meta-learning agent, and also show that the meta-learning agent can adapt to physical malfunction.