Meet the High Schooler Shaking Up Artificial Intelligence

Since its founding by Elon Musk and others nearly two years ago, nonprofit research lab OpenAI has published dozens of research papers. One posted online Thursday is different: Its lead author is still in high school. The wunderkind is Kevin Frans, a senior currently working on his college applications. He trained his first neural net--the kind of system that tech giants use to recognize your voice or face--two years ago, at the age of 15. Inspired by reports of software mastering Atari games and the board game Go, he has since been reading research papers and building pieces of what they described.