We hosted ~80 external attendees at our office and ~200 people joined remotely via our livestream throughout the day. We had attendees from industry labs like Google, Facebook, and NVIDIA in addition to students, postdocs and professors from universities like Stanford⁠(opens in a new window), UC Berkeley⁠(opens in a new window), CMU⁠(opens in a new window) and MIT⁠(opens in a new window). We also had hobbyists, artists, roboticists, and machine learning researchers in the crowd.

Since the event was hosted at our office, we took the opportunity to perform a live demo⁠(opens in a new window) of our humanoid robot hand manipulating a block using vision and reinforcement learning.

We were excited to show the hand to people and have the OpenAI Robotics team “on hand” to answer their questions! We hope to do this again in the future as it is a very different experience to see this in person.

We were extremely pleased with the outcome of the event—this was an experimental format and our expectations were definitely exceeded. The talks during the day led to interesting discussions within our team and resulted in some new ideas (e.g., self-supervision) and perspectives (e.g., traditional robotics vs deep learning robotics). After chatting with the participants and speakers, it was clear everyone felt they benefited from this event and left with a shared understanding of the diversity in the different approaches to solving the same problems. Given this feedback, we intend to repeat this format in the future, possibly as an annual symposium. We’ll share details about upcoming events at a later date.