The leaking of the Q* algorithm coincided with a period of high volatility within OpenAI, culminating in the sacking and subsequent reinstatement of Sam Altman, and ultimately the departure of Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. The leak also generated a lot of speculation about the name. The ‘Q’ part seemed relatively uncontroversial, with most commentators agreeing that it was likely a reference to Q-learning. Q-learning is a type of reinforcement learning; it’s a model-free algorithm, which means it doesn’t require a model of the environment. Instead, it learns from experience by interacting.