Vol. I · No. 65TUE, JUN 23, 2026
Archive

The Archive

Search the full wire by company, model, lab, or keyword. Every story we have ever aggregated.

Image GPT

We find that, just as a large transformer model trained on language can generate coherent text, the same exact model trained on pixel sequences can generate coherent image completions and samples. By establishing a correlation between sample quality and image classification accuracy, we show that our best generative model also contains features competitive with top convolutional nets in the unsupervised setting.

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OpenAI API

We’re releasing an API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI.

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AI and efficiency

We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012 the amount of compute needed to train a neural net to the same performance on ImageNet classification has been decreasing by a factor of 2 every 16 months. Compared to 2012, it now takes 44 times less compute to train a neural network to the level of AlexNet (by contrast, Moore’s Law would yield an 11x cost improvement over this period). Our results suggest that for AI tasks with high levels of recent investment, algorithmic progress has yielded more gains than classical hardware efficiency.

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Jukebox

We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.

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Improving verifiability in AI development

We’ve contributed to a multi-stakeholder report by 58 co-authors at 30 organizations, including the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Mila, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Center for Security and Emerging Technologies. This report describes 10 mechanisms to improve the verifiability of claims made about AI systems. Developers can use these tools to provide evidence that AI systems are safe, secure, fair, or privacy-preserving. Users, policymakers, and civil society can use these tools to evaluate AI developm...

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OpenAI Microscope

We’re introducing OpenAI Microscope, a collection of visualizations of every significant layer and neuron of eight vision “model organisms” which are often studied in interpretability. Microscope makes it easier to analyze the features that form inside these neural networks, and we hope it will help the research community as we move towards understanding these complicated systems.

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Deep double descent

We show that the double descent phenomenon occurs in CNNs, ResNets, and transformers: performance first improves, then gets worse, and then improves again with increasing model size, data size, or training time. This effect is often avoided through careful regularization. While this behavior appears to be fairly universal, we don’t yet fully understand why it happens, and view further study of this phenomenon as an important research direction.

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Procgen Benchmark

We’re releasing Procgen Benchmark, 16 simple-to-use procedurally-generated environments which provide a direct measure of how quickly a reinforcement learning agent learns generalizable skills.

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Safety Gym

We’re releasing Safety Gym, a suite of environments and tools for measuring progress towards reinforcement learning agents that respect safety constraints while training.

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GPT-2: 1.5B release

As the final model release of GPT-2’s staged release, we’re releasing the largest version (1.5B parameters) of GPT-2 along with code and model weights to facilitate detection of outputs of GPT-2 models. While there have been larger language models released since August, we’ve continued with our original staged release plan in order to provide the community with a test case of a full staged release process. We hope that this test case will be useful to developers of future powerful models, and we’re actively continuing the conversation with the AI community on responsible publication.

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Solving Rubik’s Cube with a robot hand

We’ve trained a pair of neural networks to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a human-like robot hand. The neural networks are trained entirely in simulation, using the same reinforcement learning code as OpenAI Five paired with a new technique called Automatic Domain Randomization (ADR). The system can handle situations it never saw during training, such as being prodded by a stuffed giraffe. This shows that reinforcement learning isn’t just a tool for virtual tasks, but can solve physical-world problems requiring unprecedented dexterity.

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Fine-tuning GPT-2 from human preferences

We’ve fine-tuned the 774M parameter GPT-2 language model using human feedback for various tasks, successfully matching the preferences of the external human labelers, though those preferences did not always match our own. Specifically, for summarization tasks the labelers preferred sentences copied wholesale from the input (we’d only asked them to ensure accuracy), so our models learned to copy. Summarization required 60k human labels; simpler tasks which continue text in various styles required only 5k. Our motivation is to move safety techniques closer to the general task of “machines talki...

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Emergent tool use from multi-agent interaction

We’ve observed agents discovering progressively more complex tool use while playing a simple game of hide-and-seek. Through training in our new simulated hide-and-seek environment, agents build a series of six distinct strategies and counterstrategies, some of which we did not know our environment supported. The self-supervised emergent complexity in this simple environment further suggests that multi-agent co-adaptation may one day produce extremely complex and intelligent behavior.

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Testing robustness against unforeseen adversaries

We’ve developed a method to assess whether a neural network classifier can reliably defend against adversarial attacks not seen during training. Our method yields a new metric, UAR (Unforeseen Attack Robustness), which evaluates the robustness of a single model against an unanticipated attack, and highlights the need to measure performance across a more diverse range of unforeseen attacks.

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GPT-2: 6-month follow-up

We’re releasing the 774 million parameter GPT-2 language model after the release of our small 124M model in February, staged release of our medium 355M model in May, and subsequent research with partners and the AI community into the model’s potential for misuse and societal benefit. We’re also releasing an open-source legal agreement to make it easier for organizations to initiate model-sharing partnerships with each other, and are publishing a technical report about our experience in coordinating with the wider AI research community on publication norms.

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Learning Day

At OpenAI, each Thursday is Learning Day: a day where employees have the option to self-study technical skills that will make them better at their job but which aren’t being learned from daily work.

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Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI

Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI to support us building artificial general intelligence (AGI) with widely distributed economic benefits. We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems.

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Why responsible AI development needs cooperation on safety

We’ve written a policy research paper identifying four strategies that can be used today to improve the likelihood of long-term industry cooperation on safety norms in AI: communicating risks and benefits, technical collaboration, increased transparency, and incentivizing standards. Our analysis shows that industry cooperation on safety will be instrumental in ensuring that AI systems are safe and beneficial, but competitive pressures could lead to a collective action problem, potentially causing AI companies to under-invest in safety. We hope these strategies will encourage greater cooperati...

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OpenAI Scholars 2019: Final projects

Our second class of OpenAI Scholars has concluded, with all eight scholars producing an exciting final project showcased at Scholars Demo Day at OpenAI.

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OpenAI Fellows Fall 2018: Final projects

Our second class of OpenAI Fellows has wrapped up, with each Fellow going from a machine learning beginner to core OpenAI contributor in the course of a 6-month apprenticeship. We are currently reviewing applications on a rolling basis for our next round of OpenAI Fellows Summer 2019.

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