person

Joel Lehman

Independent researcher; ex-OpenAI; novelty search

Independent researcher; previously at OpenAI and Uber AI Labs. Co-author with Kenneth Stanley of 'Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned'; long-time advocate of intrinsically motivated and open-ended approaches.

current Researcher, Independent

past Researcher, OpenAI

@joelbot3000

Strategy positions

Open-endednessendorses

Build AI via open-ended self-generated curricula; safety must follow from the dynamics

Argues open-ended search and machine creativity are essential capabilities for AI to be reliably useful in scientific research; views this as a more honest framing than 'AGI'.

Open-ended search is not a luxury feature for AI. It is what scientific discovery actually looks like, and any AI that wants to do science has to do open-ended search.

≡ tweetJoel Lehman, Twitter· X· 2024· faithful paraphrase

Closest strategy neighbours

by jaccard overlap

Other people whose strategy tags overlap with Joel Lehman's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.

David Ha
shared 1 · J=1.00
Sakana AI co-founder; ex-Stability AI head of strategy
Deepak Pathak
shared 1 · J=1.00
CMU; curiosity-driven exploration; humanoid robotics
Kenneth O. Stanley
shared 1 · J=1.00
Maven; ex-OpenAI; novelty search and open-endedness
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
shared 1 · J=1.00
Inria; developmental AI and curiosity
Tim Rocktäschel
shared 1 · J=1.00
Google DeepMind / UCL; open-ended learning

Record last updated 2026-04-25.