OpenAI Team Updates: Pieter Abbeel and Shivon Zilis Join

OpenAI has expanded its team with the addition of Pieter Abbeel and Shivon Zilis. These appointments bring specialized expertise in robot learning, deep reinforcement learning, and the broader machine intelligence landscape to the organization.

Pieter Abbeel: Advancing Robot and Reinforcement Learning

Pieter Abbeel, a professor at UC Berkeley, has joined OpenAI full-time on leave from his university position. Abbeel and his lab have contributed significant advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) and robot learning.

At OpenAI, Abbeel's work will focus on combining unsupervised learning with reinforcement learning. This research direction is intended to address fundamental limitations currently present in reinforcement learning algorithms.

Shivon Zilis: Strategic Advisory on Machine Intelligence

Shivon Zilis has joined OpenAI as an official advisor. Zilis is a partner at Bloomberg Beta with a focus on machine intelligence and has published extensive writing on the evolution of the machine intelligence landscape.

OpenAI had been receiving advice from Zilis for several months prior to making her role as an advisor official.