Would be interested to hear about his role at Open AI - I would have thought you'd need at least a PhD in Statistics/CS to be able to contribute to AI research, no?
There's a surprising amount of traditional engineering work needed to make AI systems happen. Over the past month or two, I've focused largely on launching OpenAI Gym: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/726099677716713472.
That being said, I'm planning on working on a research project next. As Ilya likes to say, deep learning is a shallow field — it's actually relatively easy to pick up and start making contributions.