Episode 04: Joel Lehman, OpenAI, on evolution, open-endedness, and reinforcement learning

Joel Lehman was previously a founding member at Uber AI Labs and assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He's now a research scientist at OpenAI, where he focuses on open-endedness, reinforcement learning, and AI safety.

Joel’s PhD dissertation introduced the novelty search algorithm. That work inspired him to write the popular science book, “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned”, with his PhD advisor Ken Stanley, which discusses what evolutionary algorithms imply for how individuals and society should think about objectives.

We discuss this and much more:

- How discovering novelty search totally changed Joel’s philosophy of life

- Sometimes, can you reach your objective more quickly by not trying to reach it?

- How one might evolve intelligence

- Why reinforcement learning is a natural framework for open-endedness