This is great! The goals seem reasonably ambitious and mostly doable over a few years.
I am surprised by #2: "Build a household robot". It's my understanding that efficient actuation and power are largely unsolved problems outside of the software realm. What's the plan for tackling stairs, variable height targets, manipulator dexterity, power supply, etc. in a general purpose robot with off-the-shelf parts? (Answering these questions may be part of that goal but maybe someone knows more on the subject.)
Pieter Abbeel has been working towards household robots for quite a while; given his involvement and several of his students at OpenAI it's not surprising they'd be thinking along similar lines. The issues you mention are real, but current hardware is already capable of useful tasks if we had software to control it properly. For example, here's a demo of a tele-operated PR2 performing household chores:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GAz5F03Ls#t=60s
I wonder if OpenAI could define and build against a robot API that hardware robots would implement in different ways. That way OpenAI could focus on the software and various other teams could compete to solve all the mechanical challenges you mention.
When it comes to AI/ML most problems seem "doable over a few years". Yet in practice this rarely is the case. These are some extremely lofty goals. The team behind OpenAI is quite capable but to say they'll have any of these done in a few years is quite a stretch. I'm guessing they may achieve one of the goals in a decade. But I'd love to be wrong.
It was an off-hand remark. I'm aware of the landscape, though perhaps slightly more optimistic. The first goal is simple enough and largely underway with the Gym. Significant progress has been made on #3 and #4 just in the last year but I agree that "a few years" is a bit brief. I remain doubtful about #2.
Off-the-shelf robots are convenient for developing learning algorithms. When the learning algorithms are good enough to take advantage of more capable hardware, it'll make sense to build it.
I am surprised by #2: "Build a household robot". It's my understanding that efficient actuation and power are largely unsolved problems outside of the software realm. What's the plan for tackling stairs, variable height targets, manipulator dexterity, power supply, etc. in a general purpose robot with off-the-shelf parts? (Answering these questions may be part of that goal but maybe someone knows more on the subject.)