In the earliest days, I was doing everything required to make sure everyone else could focus on research: recruiting, operations, spinning up the cluster, taking out the garbage; really whatever needed to be done.

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.