We’ve found that the biggest contributions at OpenAI come from cross-functional experts, so we either need to hire them or grow them here. Before Learning Day, we very rarely saw people grow cross-functionally—for example, employees coming from a software background rarely picked up machine learning (something equally rare in other organizations except academia). Since Learning Day, this kind of growth has become very common.
On a typical learning day, people do things like:
We think Learning Day might be useful for other organizations, so we’d like to share how it started and works at OpenAI.
We first tried out Learning Day on our Robotics team. Here’s how our Head of Robotics, Wojciech Zaremba (Woj), came up with the idea:
Woj Head of robotics
In November 2018, I realized that I’d been stagnating in a number of areas because I was always overwhelmed with urgent tasks. These areas were becoming increasingly important for me to know. For example, I kept wanting to evaluate whether my team should switch deep learning frameworks, but I kept being interrupted after an hour or two of coding—which resulted in no forward progress. I kept hearing about research in other domains like causality or energy-based models which might be applicable to robotics, but I didn’t know anything about these fields—and reading about them for half an hour at a time wasn’t helpful.
I knew the best way to solve this problem would be to carve out a day a week for learning. But if this was what I needed to be more productive, it seemed likely that this would also be what my team needed. So I tried doing this for the whole team as an experiment.
I figured that we’d take a short-term productivity hit but see gains in one to two years. But within a month, I started to see better communication between researchers and engineers, with everyone starting to use jargon from each others’ specialty correctly (e.g. discounted reward, MAML, self-attention, container, SRAM, StatefulSet, Raft). Within half a year, I started to see researchers talking about restructuring our codebase using domain-driven design, and engineers picking up research tasks.
Though we encouraged self-study before, it never seemed to work. That’s different now—for example, one team member went from knowing nothing about machine learning to making computer vision contributions within three months. One very strong engineer studied RL for half a year, and now is producing outputs comparable to what I’d expect from an RL PhD.
Learning Day happens each Thursday. Woj wrote the following guidelines for the Robotics team, but we’ve adapted these principles across each team that has adopted Learning Day:
# Learning day is a gift ❤️
Feel free to use learning day for:
This learning day is a gift from Woj. Therefore, I kindly ask you to:
To keep people accountable, we ask everyone to post in Slack what they learned that day.
## What we learn on Learning Day
The following are examples of what people learn on a single Learning Day.
#### Deep learning reading
#### Deep learning coding
#### Math and statistics
#### Historical context on powerful technologies
We also reimburse reasonable self-studying expenses such as books and tutors, used mostly to learn fundamentals in mathematics. These costs are very worthwhile investments!
## How we sustain it
Learning Day’s impact comes from being rigorous about how people use it. It’s not a day for leisure, but instead a day for a specific kind of hard work. We see and try to counteract the following failure modes so that we can sustain it long term:
Learning Day could be used for work. Learning Day could turn into a normal working day because people may want to accomplish their main project faster (due to internal or external pressure). We prevent this by having Learning Day on the same day for every team. This creates positive peer pressure and encourages everyone to take advantage of Learning Day.
Learning Day could expand in scope to non–Learning Days. We actually haven’t yet observed this happen. Based on what we’ve seen with other organizations, we think this would most likely indicate that the person isn’t excited enough about their main project, and would be a sign to their manager that the person should switch teams or projects.
Learning Day could be used for leisure. Our solution is for every team member to share their progress on Slack viaGeekbot(opens in a new window). This keeps the excitement high and provides an accountability mechanism.
## Learning Day beyond Robotics
We’ve recently expanded Learning Day from a subset of our technical teams to the entire company. It’s become a cultural staple—on our most recent internal survey, Learning Day was the aspect of our culture that people talked about the most. We’re excited to see its impact as we continue to evolve and support Learning Day in the future.
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