OpenAI Team Update January 2017

OpenAI expands team to 45 members

In January 2017, OpenAI announced that its team had grown to 45 people. The organization is focusing its efforts on pushing the frontier of AI capabilities through the validation of novel ideas, the creation of new software systems, and the deployment of machine learning on robots.

New full-time hires and technical expertise

OpenAI added several specialists across various technical domains to strengthen its research and engineering capabilities:

Robotics and Hardware

  • Bob McGrew: Focuses on robotics; previously led engineering and product management at Palantir and studied multiagent systems at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
  • Ankur Handa: Specializes in the intersection of hardware, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), and deep learning; formerly a post-doc at the University of Cambridge and a Dyson Fellow at Imperial College London.
  • Alex Ray: Previously built radio encryption systems for small satellites at Planet Labs and worked on aerial robots at Airware.
  • Christopher Berner: Builds quadrotors and created Rospilot, an autopilot companion system using commodity hardware.
  • Rachel Fong: Experienced in designing robots and building haptic surgical simulators.
  • Shariq Hashme: Experienced in DIY hardware projects, including a VR treadmill.

Distributed Systems and Infrastructure

  • Christopher Berner: Previously an engineer at Facebook, where he led the data warehouse deployment of Presto, an open-source distributed SQL engine, scaling it to hundreds of petabytes.
  • Erika Reinhardt: Appointed as Engineering Director to manage and grow the team; previously Director of Product Engineering at Planet Labs.
  • Peter Welinder: Former engineering lead at Dropbox, where he led photos infrastructure, computer vision, and machine learning teams.
  • Jonathan Gray: Previously built a peer-to-peer file sync tool at AeroFS.
  • Jeremy Schlatter: Built the tight encoding implementation for OpenAI Universe’s go-vncdriver and tools for collecting human demonstrations of Universe environments.

Machine Learning and Optimization

  • Jakub Pachocki: Specializes in the theory of optimization and co-invented algorithms for solving linear systems on graphs and computing the geometric median.
  • Yaroslav Bulatov: Formerly an engineer at Google Brain and Google Streetview, where he designed a system that outperformed humans at recognizing outdoor house numbers.
  • Szymon Sidor: Previously worked on model-based reinforcement learning at Vicarious and question answering at MetaMind.
  • Tom Brown: Former CTO of Grouper, experienced in writing algorithms for large-scale matching using Facebook data.
  • Aleks Kamko: Research background in distributed machine learning from Berkeley.

Transition of interns to full-time roles

Seven former OpenAI interns have transitioned to full-time positions: Catherine Olsson, Jonathan Ho, Paul Christiano, Peter Chen, Prafulla Dhariwal, Rein Houthooft, and Rocky Duan.

Sources