Welcome, Pieter and Shivon!

We have two more team updates.

• Pieter Abbeel. Pieter(opens in a new window) is a professor at UC Berkeley specializing in making robots learn. He’s been giving us advice since before OpenAI was born, and now he’s taking a leave from Berkeley to work with us full-time. Pieter and his lab members have been responsible for some of the most striking advances in robot learning(opens in a new window) and deep reinforcement learning (RL)(opens in a new window) in recent years. Together, we will explore ways to combine unsupervised learning with RL, which we believe could address fundamental limitations in today’s RL algorithms.

• Shivon Zilis. Shivon(opens in a new window) is a partner at Bloomberg Beta(opens in a new window) focusing on machine intelligence. She has an extremely broad view of how the space is evolving (and has(opens in a new window) written(opens in a new window) extensively(opens in a new window) on the landscape). We’ve been going to her for advice for the past few months, and now she’s becoming an official advisor to OpenAI.

We could not be more excited to work with both. Welcome Pieter and Shivon!