Introducing OpenAI
This is a key takeaway: &quot;...we are going to ask YC companies to make whatever data they are comfortable making available to OpenAI. And Elon is also going to figure out what data Tesla and Space X can share.&quot;<p>Money is great, openness is great, big name researchers are also a huge plus. But data data data, that could turn out to be very valuable. I don&#x27;t know if Sam meant that YC companies would be encouraged to contribute data openly, as in making potentially valuable business assets available to the public, or that the data would be available to the OpenAI Fellows (or whatever they&#x27;re called). Either way, it could be a huge gain for research and development.<p>I know that I don&#x27;t get a wish list here, but if I did it would be nice to see OpenAI encourage the following from its researchers:<p>1) All publications should include code <i>and</i> data whenever possible. Things like gitxiv are helping, but this is far from being an AI community standard<p>2) Encourage people to try to surpass benchmarks established by their published research, when possible. Many modern ML papers play with results and parameters until they can show that their new method out performs every other method. It would be great to see an institution say &quot;Here&#x27;s the best our method can do on dataset X, can you beat it and how?&quot;<p>3) Sponsor competitions frequently. The Netflix Prize was a huge learning experience for a lot of people, and continues to be a valuable educational resource. We need more of that<p>4) Try to encourage a diversity of backgrounds. IF they choose to sponsor competitions, it would be cool if they let winners or those who performed well join OpenAI as researchers at least for awhile, even if they don&#x27;t have PhDs in computer science<p>The &quot;evil&quot; AI and safety stuff is just science fiction, but whatever. Hopefully they will be able to use their resources and position to move the state of AI forward