OpenAI News
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Report from the OpenAI hackathon
On March 3rd, we hosted our first hackathon with 100 members of the artificial intelligence community.
Reptile: A scalable meta-learning algorithm
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…
OpenAI Scholars
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.
Ingredients for robotics research
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.
OpenAI hackathon
Come to OpenAI’s office in San Francisco’s Mission District for talks and a hackathon on Saturday, March 3rd.
Preparing for malicious uses of AI
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…
Interpretable machine learning through teaching
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
Discovering types for entity disambiguation
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).
Requests for Research 2.0
We’re releasing a new batch of seven unsolved problems which have come up in the course of our research at OpenAI.
Block-sparse GPU kernels
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.
Learning a hierarchy
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.