OpenAI
The OpenAI team is now 45 people. Together, we’re pushing the frontier of AI capabilities—whether by validating novel ideas, creating new software systems, or deploying machine learning on robots.
The OpenAI team is now 45 people. Together, we’re pushing the frontier of AI capabilities—whether by validating novel ideas, creating new software systems, or deploying machine learning on robots. Wecontinueto look for creative, motivated researchers and engineers to help us achieve ourgoals.
Welcome to everyone who’s joined since our lastteam update!
* Aleks Kamko.Aleks(opens in a new window)is a recent graduate from Berkeley where he did research on distributed machine learning and taught Data Structures and Operating Systems for 2 years. Previously, Aleks was an intern at Stripe working on the Financial Operations team.
* Alex Ray.Alex(opens in a new window)previously built radio encryption systems for small satellites atPlanet Labs(opens in a new window). Prior to that he worked on aerial robots atAirware(opens in a new window). He has a degree inTextile Engineering(opens in a new window)from NCSU, where he worked on a design for aninflatable habitat(opens in a new window)for living on Mars.
* Ankur Handa. Ankur obtained his PhD in real-time camera tracking at Imperial College London, then became a post-doc at the University of Cambridge to focus on scene understanding via his work onSceneNet(opens in a new window). He returned to Imperial as a Dyson Fellow to continue his research on scene understanding withSceneNet RGB-D(opens in a new window). His interests lie at the intersection of hardware,SLAM(opens in a new window), and deep learning.
* Bob McGrew. Bob formerly led engineering and product management at Palantir, having worked there for a decade as it grew from 10 to 1,500 employees. Before Palantir, Bob was a PhD candidate in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab working on multiagent systems. At OpenAI, he focuses on robotics.
* Christopher Berner.Christopher(opens in a new window)was previously an engineer at Facebook, where he worked onPresto(opens in a new window), an open-source distributed SQL engine. He led the data warehouse deployment of Presto, and scaled it to hundreds of petabytes of data. In his spare time, he builds quadrotors and createdRospilot(opens in a new window), an autopilot companion system that provides real-time video streaming and other features, using commodity hardware.
* Erika Reinhardt.Erika(opens in a new window)was previously the Director of Product Engineering atPlanet Labs(opens in a new window), where she spent the last four years building teams and software to support collecting and distributing high-frequency satellite imagery, ranging from mission control and manufacturing management, to image processing and platform design. She studied mechanical engineering and computer science at MIT. As OpenAI’s Engineering Director, Erika will help manage and grow the team.
* Jakub Pachocki. Jakub recently finished a PhD at CMU where he worked on the theory of optimization. He co-invented the fastest known algorithms forsolving linear systems(opens in a new window)on graphs andcomputing the geometric median(opens in a new window). In the past, Jakub was a top competitive programmer, and has won theGoogle Code Jam(opens in a new window)and gained a gold medal in theACM-ICPC(opens in a new window).
* Jeremy Schlatter.Jeremy(opens in a new window)is an engineer who previously worked at Mailgun and Google. Since joining OpenAI he has built thetight encoding(opens in a new window)implementation for OpenAI Universe’sgo-vncdriver(opens in a new window)and tools for collecting human demonstrations of Universe environments.
* Jonathan Gray. Jonathan previously built a peer-to-peer file sync tool atAeroFS(opens in a new window), and was an early engineer atMagic(opens in a new window), an SMS-based virtual personal assistant. Prior to that, he studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. In high school and during his undergrad, he built software for cancer treatment at Sunnybrook Research Institute’sFocused Ultrasound Group(opens in a new window).
* Peter Welinder.Peter(opens in a new window)was an engineering lead at Dropbox, where he led the photos infrastructure, computer vision, and machine learning teams. Before that, he co-founded AI startupAnchovi Labs(opens in a new window)and did his graduate work at Caltech incomputer vision(opens in a new window)andcrowd sourcing(opens in a new window).
* Rachel Fong. Rachel most recently worked on data engineering atLocu(opens in a new window). In the past she’s designed robots, and built a haptic surgical simulator, a$50 desktop 3D scanner, and an NLP backend to extract data from uploaded documents to create personalized curriculums for learning language. She studied computer science at MIT.
* Shariq Hashme. Shariq founded an OCR startup, and previously worked at Gigster. He also builds DIY projects, like a$80 VR treadmill(opens in a new window), a portable shower, and a device to control a mouse cursor with a tongue. He studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, where he founded ahackathon club(opens in a new window)which won the first-everMajor League Hacking(opens in a new window)season.
* Szymon Sidor.Szymon(opens in a new window)previously worked on model-based reinforcement learning atVicarious(opens in a new window), question answering at MetaMind, and on real-time file processing infrastructure at Dropbox. He earned his master’s degree from MIT, where he explored reinforcement learning approaches to multi-stage reasoning in natural language processing, and identifiedsecurity flaws in Android(opens in a new window).
* Tom Brown.Tom(opens in a new window)was the cofounder and CTO ofGrouper(opens in a new window), where he wrote algorithms that used Facebook data to match up millions of people so they could meet in the real world. Before that he studiedcomputational cognitive science(opens in a new window)at MIT, and built early versions of the core server atMoPub(opens in a new window), now theworld’s largest mobile ad server(opens in a new window).
* Yaroslav Bulatov.Yaroslav(opens in a new window)was previously an engineer at Google Brain and Google Streetview, where he implemented and trained large-scale neural networks. He designed the firstsystem(opens in a new window)that outperformed humans at recognizing outdoor house numbers.
The following former OpenAIinternshave joined us full-time:Catherine Olsson,Jonathan Ho,Paul Christiano,Peter Chen,Prafulla Dhariwal,Rein Houthooft, and Rocky Duan.