The Archive

We’ve created MuseNet, a deep neural network that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments, and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles. MuseNet was not explicitly programmed with our understanding of music, but instead discovered patterns of harmony, rhythm, and style by learning to predict the next token in hundreds of thousands of MIDI files. MuseNet uses the same general-purpose unsupervised technology as GPT-2, a large-scale transformer model trained to predict the next token in a sequence, whether audio or text.

We’ve developed the Sparse Transformer, a deep neural network which sets new records at predicting what comes next in a sequence—whether text, images, or sound. It uses an algorithmic improvement of the attention mechanism to extract patterns from sequences 30x longer than possible previously.

OpenAI Five is the first AI to beat the world champions in an esports game, having won two back-to-back games versus the world champion Dota 2 team, OG, at Finals this weekend. Both OpenAI Five and DeepMind’s AlphaStar had previously beaten good pros privately but lost their live pro matches, making this also the first time an AI has beaten esports pros on livestream.

We’ll be holding our final live event for OpenAI Five at 11:30am PT on April 13.

We’ve made progress towards stable and scalable training of energy-based models (EBMs) resulting in better sample quality and generalization ability than existing models. Generation in EBMs spends more compute to continually refine its answers and doing so can generate samples competitive with GANs at low temperatures, while also having mode coverage guarantees of likelihood-based models. We hope these findings stimulate further research into this promising class of models.

Our class of eight scholars (out of 550 applicants) brings together collective expertise in literature, philosophy, cell biology, statistics, economics, quantum physics, and business innovation.

We’ve created OpenAI LP, a new “capped-profit” company that allows us to rapidly increase our investments in compute and talent while including checks and balances to actualize our mission.

We’ve created activation atlases (in collaboration with Google researchers), a new technique for visualizing what interactions between neurons can represent. As AI systems are deployed in increasingly sensitive contexts, having a better understanding of their internal decision-making processes will let us identify weaknesses and investigate failures.

We’re releasing a Neural MMO, a massively multiagent game environment for reinforcement learning agents. Our platform supports a large, variable number of agents within a persistent and open-ended task. The inclusion of many agents and species leads to better exploration, divergent niche formation, and greater overall competence.

On February 2, we held our first Spinning Up Workshop as part of our new education initiative at OpenAI.

We’ve written a paper arguing that long-term AI safety research needs social scientists to ensure AI alignment algorithms succeed when actual humans are involved. Properly aligning advanced AI systems with human values requires resolving many uncertainties related to the psychology of human rationality, emotion, and biases. The aim of this paper is to spark further collaboration between machine learning and social science researchers, and we plan to hire social scientists to work on this full time at OpenAI.

We’ve trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training.

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.