In 2019 we had just finished up Pluribus and were discussing what to pursue next. We saw the incredible breakthroughs happening across the field, like GPT-2, AlphaStar, and OpenAI Five, and knew that we needed to be ambitious with our next goal because the field was advancing quickly. We were discussing what would be the hardest game to make an AI for and landed on Diplomacy due to its integration of natural language and strategy. We thought it could take 10 years to fully address, but we were okay with that because historically that kind of research timeframe had been the norm. Obviously things worked out better than we expected though.

Our long-term goal was always the full natural language game of Diplomacy but we tried to break the project down into smaller milestones that we could tackle along the way. That led to our papers on human-level no-press Diplomacy, no-press Diplomacy from scratch, better modeling of humans in no-press Diplomacy, and expert-level no-press Diplomacy. -NB