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Sidor: Strong Engineering Is Much More Valuable at OpenAI than Writing Exotic Models

Szymon Sidor · Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator · Nov 8, 2017 · at 5:30

Szymon Sidor, OpenAI Research Scientist, explains the hiring and skillset priorities for reinforcement learning work on Dota 2.

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“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.”

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
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
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Sidor: Pro Dota player reached 30% win rate against OpenAI bot
“I think it might be actually 30. And that player played hundreds of games with the bot.”
Szymon Sidor Nov 8, 2017 ▶ 49:23 Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam Altman · Y Combinator
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