Who are the actual staff involved? What sort of things have they worked on and published before?
Sutskever is a researcher at Google, worked with Hinton in Toronto and Andrew Ng at Stanford.
Karpathy studied in Toronto and at Stanford, worked under Fei-Fei Li, worked at Google. He also has an awesome blog and seems very active and passionate about computer vision and ML.
Kingma also works with deep neural nets, worked under Yann LeCun (who works at Facebook)
Schulman is a PhD Candidate at Berkeley with publications at top conferences.
Zaremba is an PhD student at NYU, intern at Facebook. Impressive publication list and awards.
Abbeel is at Stanford's AI lab.
Bengio is one of the "stars" and celebrated figures of the deep net revival.
Levine is a researcher at Google working on deep nets with many serious papers.
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Basically these are the main domain experts among them. The list is quite skewed to Google/Facebook, Stanford/Berkeley/Toronto and deep net researchers, working primarily on computer vision.
Uhhh.... https://www.google.com/search?q=Pieter+Abbeel That's a lot of results showing how he's been a professor at Berkeley since 2008.
He received his PhD at Stanford, then went to be a professor at Berkeley.
Quite surprised to see so many corporate AI people being in on this. I'd have thought that Google and Facebook would prefer to keep their research secret.