Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

Led by Wojciech Zaremba, the Polish researcher stolen from under Google and Facebook as OpenAI was founded, they’d spent more than two years working toward this eye-catching feat. In the past, many others had built robots that could solve a Rubik’s Cube. Some devices could solve it in less than a second. But this was a new trick. This was a robotic hand that moved like a human hand, not specialized hardware built solely for solving Rubik’s Cubes. Typically, engineers programmed behavior into robots with pains-taking precision, spending months defining elaborate rules for each tiny movement. But it would take decades, maybe even centuries, for engineers to individually define each piece of behavior a five-fingered hand would need to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Zaremba and his team had built a system that could learn this behavior on its own. They were part of a new community of researchers who believed robots could learn practically any skill inside virtual reality before applying it in the real world.