One of the goals for education at OpenAI is to help people develop the skills needed to participate in research and development in AI—especially in deep RL, a core area of research at OpenAI. From our experience working with Scholars⁠(opens in a new window) and Fellows⁠(opens in a new window), we’ve found that the key ingredients for skill development are:

The challenge for education at OpenAI is to figure out how to deliver these at scale. While sharing a curriculum at scale is relatively easy, it isn’t obvious how to scale up mentorship and guidance on projects. Our working theory is that workshops might help us do just that. Our first Spinning Up workshop has given us several positive signs that this is a useful direction, and we’re excited to share what we learned.

We hosted around 90 people at our office and involved nearly 300 more through our livestream. Our guests came from a wide range of backgrounds, including academic research, software engineering, data science, ML engineering, medicine, and education. The level of ML experience varied quite significantly across the group, from “almost none” to “built their own Dota bot!”

More than 500 people, from all around the world, applied to participate in this workshop. Although we sadly couldn’t invite everyone to this one because of space constraints, we want to continue engaging the community with future events.