AI Weekly Malaysia

We’ve developed a method to assess whether a neural network classifier can reliably defend against adversarial attacks not seen during training. Our method yields a new metric, UAR (Unforeseen Attack Robustness), which evaluates the robustness of a single model against an unanticipated attack, and highlights the need to measure performance across a more diverse range of unforeseen attacks.

We’re releasing the 774 million parameter GPT-2 language model after the release of our small 124M model in February, staged release of our medium 355M model in May, and subsequent research with partners and the AI community into the model’s potential for misuse and societal benefit. We’re also releasing an open-source legal agreement to make it easier for organizations to initiate model-sharing partnerships with each other, and are publishing a technical report about our experience in coordinating with the wider AI research community on publication norms.

At OpenAI, each Thursday is Learning Day: a day where employees have the option to self-study technical skills that will make them better at their job but which aren’t being learned from daily work.

Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI to support us building artificial general intelligence (AGI) with widely distributed economic benefits. We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems.

We’ve written a policy research paper identifying four strategies that can be used today to improve the likelihood of long-term industry cooperation on safety norms in AI: communicating risks and benefits, technical collaboration, increased transparency, and incentivizing standards. Our analysis shows that industry cooperation on safety will be instrumental in ensuring that AI systems are safe and beneficial, but competitive pressures could lead to a collective action problem, potentially causing AI companies to under-invest in safety. We hope these strategies will encourage greater cooperation on the safe development of AI and lead to better global outcomes of AI.

We hosted the first OpenAI Robotics Symposium on April 27, 2019.

Our second class of OpenAI Scholars has concluded, with all eight scholars producing an exciting final project showcased at Scholars Demo Day at OpenAI.

Our second class of OpenAI Fellows has wrapped up, with each Fellow going from a machine learning beginner to core OpenAI contributor in the course of a 6-month apprenticeship. We are currently reviewing applications on a rolling basis for our next round of OpenAI Fellows Summer 2019.

We’ve created MuseNet, a deep neural network that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments, and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles. MuseNet was not explicitly programmed with our understanding of music, but instead discovered patterns of harmony, rhythm, and style by learning to predict the next token in hundreds of thousands of MIDI files. MuseNet uses the same general-purpose unsupervised technology as GPT-2, a large-scale transformer model trained to predict the next token in a sequence, whether audio or text.

We’ve developed the Sparse Transformer, a deep neural network which sets new records at predicting what comes next in a sequence—whether text, images, or sound. It uses an algorithmic improvement of the attention mechanism to extract patterns from sequences 30x longer than possible previously.

OpenAI Five is the first AI to beat the world champions in an esports game, having won two back-to-back games versus the world champion Dota 2 team, OG, at Finals this weekend. Both OpenAI Five and DeepMind’s AlphaStar had previously beaten good pros privately but lost their live pro matches, making this also the first time an AI has beaten esports pros on livestream.

We’ll be holding our final live event for OpenAI Five at 11:30am PT on April 13.

We’ve made progress towards stable and scalable training of energy-based models (EBMs) resulting in better sample quality and generalization ability than existing models. Generation in EBMs spends more compute to continually refine its answers and doing so can generate samples competitive with GANs at low temperatures, while also having mode coverage guarantees of likelihood-based models. We hope these findings stimulate further research into this promising class of models.

Our class of eight scholars (out of 550 applicants) brings together collective expertise in literature, philosophy, cell biology, statistics, economics, quantum physics, and business innovation.

We’ve created OpenAI LP, a new “capped-profit” company that allows us to rapidly increase our investments in compute and talent while including checks and balances to actualize our mission.

We’ve created activation atlases (in collaboration with Google researchers), a new technique for visualizing what interactions between neurons can represent. As AI systems are deployed in increasingly sensitive contexts, having a better understanding of their internal decision-making processes will let us identify weaknesses and investigate failures.

We’re releasing a Neural MMO, a massively multiagent game environment for reinforcement learning agents. Our platform supports a large, variable number of agents within a persistent and open-ended task. The inclusion of many agents and species leads to better exploration, divergent niche formation, and greater overall competence.

On February 2, we held our first Spinning Up Workshop as part of our new education initiative at OpenAI.

We’ve written a paper arguing that long-term AI safety research needs social scientists to ensure AI alignment algorithms succeed when actual humans are involved. Properly aligning advanced AI systems with human values requires resolving many uncertainties related to the psychology of human rationality, emotion, and biases. The aim of this paper is to spark further collaboration between machine learning and social science researchers, and we plan to hire social scientists to work on this full time at OpenAI.

We’ve trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training.

Our first cohort of OpenAI Fellows has concluded, with each Fellow going from a machine learning beginner to core OpenAI contributor in the course of a 6-month apprenticeship.

We’ve discovered that the gradient noise scale, a simple statistical metric, predicts the parallelizability of neural network training on a wide range of tasks. Since complex tasks tend to have noisier gradients, increasingly large batch sizes are likely to become useful in the future, removing one potential limit to further growth of AI systems. More broadly, these results show that neural network training need not be considered a mysterious art, but can be rigorized and systematized.

We’re releasing CoinRun, a training environment which provides a metric for an agent’s ability to transfer its experience to novel situations and has already helped clarify a longstanding puzzle in reinforcement learning. CoinRun strikes a desirable balance in complexity: the environment is simpler than traditional platformer games like Sonic the Hedgehog but still poses a worthy generalization challenge for state of the art algorithms.