Team++

OpenAI

We’ve had some fantastic people join over the past few months (and we’re still hiring). Welcome, everyone!

Full-timers

• Yura Burda. Yura⁠(opens in a new window) finished a math PhD at the age of 24, and switched into machine learning a year and a half ago. He’s focusing on generative models⁠(opens in a new window). He discovered⁠(opens in a new window) a simple but fundamental improvement to the variational lower bound that had evaded notice since its original discovery decades ago.

• Ian Goodfellow. Ian⁠(opens in a new window) is well known for his many contributions to machine learning, including the MaxOut Network⁠(opens in a new window) and the Generative Adversarial Network⁠(opens in a new window), the latter of which is a driver of excitement in generative modeling research. In addition, he’s the lead author of the book⁠(opens in a new window) on deep learning.

• Alec Radford. Alec⁠(opens in a new window) created DCGAN⁠(opens in a new window), a neural model that could generate large, coherent images containing an unprecedented level of global coherence and detail. In addition, his model has learned to do image analogies⁠(opens in a new window) in an entirely unsupervised way.

• Tim Salimans. Tim⁠(opens in a new window) is an expert on variational methods. The author of the first paper⁠(opens in a new window) on stochastic gradient variational inference (for which he won the Lindley prize⁠(opens in a new window)), he was at one point ranked number 2 overall⁠(opens in a new window) on Kaggle.

Interns

Also joining us for the summer (and in some cases, to continue the collaboration once they return to their home institution):

As a closing note, we get a lot of questions about what we’re working on, how we work, and what we’re trying to achieve. We’re not being intentionally mysterious; we’ve just been busy launching the organization (and finding awesome people to help us do so!).