Polish AI ‘pioneer’ makes MIT top innovators list

Warsaw, Poland – 30-year-old Wojciech Zaremba from Poland has been named on the latest Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 35 Innovators Under 35 list for “teaching a robot hand to figure things out on its own”. He is a cofounder of the AI research group OpenAI, along with Elon Musk and Sam Altman. MIT innovators

Wojciech Zaremba led a team that used machine learning to train a robot hand to teach itself to pick up a toy block in different environments. The robot was tasked with figuring out on its own how to accomplish the complex task of grasping a block and twisting it around with its robotic fingers in response to commands. It was powered through a neural network, a computer program that mimics the type of networks our brains use.

Although reinforcement learning has been used before in robotics, it had never worked on anything as complicated as a robotic hand, claims the MIT Technology Review website. MIT innovators

Born in the southwestern Polish town of Kluczbork, Zaremba is a graduate of the University of Warsaw and of the French École Polytechnique. In 2016, he received his PhD in deep learning from New York University (NYU) under the supervision of Yann LeCunn, vice president and chief AI scientist at Facebook. 

After briefly working for Google Brain and Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, he now leads the robotics team at OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company cofounded by Elon Musk whose aim is to create safe artificial intelligence which “benefits all of humanity”.

He also sits on the advisory board of Growbots, a Silicon Valley startup company aiming to automate sales processes with the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

In 2017, Zaremba was named on the Polish edition of magazine Forbes’ list of the 30 most influential Poles under 30.