Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Sidor: OpenAI's Dota bot required daily overnight updates to beat pros

Szymon Sidor · Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator · Nov 8, 2017 · at 35:26

Szymon Sidor (OpenAI research scientist) describes the rapid daily iteration and overnight training required to defeat professional players at The International.

0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Because actually it's a little known fact, but from day to day, like each version of the experiment was not good enough to beat the next player, next, next day's professional.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Szymon Sidor

Opinion
Sidor: Rigorous baseline optimization will advance AI more than complex architectures
“And you know, it's not the kind of sexy research that people want to see, where you have like some hierarchy of big RNN, but it actually, this kind of research, I think at this point will advance field the most.”
Szymon Sidor Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 2:33 Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator
Opinion
Sidor: Strong Engineering Is Much More Valuable at OpenAI than Writing Exotic Models
“So, so essentially becoming a good engineer for our team is much more valuable than, for example, people spending you know, months upon months implementing exotic models in TensorFlow.”
Szymon Sidor Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 5:30 Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator
Insight
Sidor: Machine learning math is easier to learn than good engineering
“Getting good basics in linear algebra and in basic statistics, that's, especially when Doing experiments, it's easy to make like elementary statistics mistakes and linear algebra is just kind of most of what you need to know to like basic optimization as well …”
Szymon Sidor Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 52:28 Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator
Opinion
Sidor: AI research neglects understanding existing methods and limits
“And what people do is people kind of try to invent problems and the, such as solving some complicated games of character structure, and they try to Add kind of extra features to their models to combat those problems, but I think there's very little research ha…”
Szymon Sidor Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 1:26 Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator
Assertion Partly supported
Sidor: OpenAI's RL bot beat its hand-coded bot after one to two weeks
“So I leave, there is nothing, I come back, there is this reinforcement learning bot, and actually, it's beating our scripted bot after, like a week worth of engineering effort. Possibly it was two weeks, but it was something very miniature compared to the deve…”
Szymon Sidor Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 18:51 Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator
Assertion Supported
OpenAI Dota bot learned baiting behavior without explicit reward incentives
“It was like one of the major examples, one of the major examples of the things that we kind of didn't have explicit incentive for, and yet the bot actually learned them.”
Szymon Sidor Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 38:46 Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.