Why are people being so critical about this work? Sure, the blog post provides a simplified picture about what the system is actually capable of, but it's still helpful for a non-ML audience to get a better understanding of the high-level motivation behind the work. The OpenAI folks are trying to educate the broader public as well, not just ML/AI researchers.

Imagine if this discovery were made by some undergraduate student who had little experience in the traditions of how ML benchmark experiments are done, or was just starting out her ML career. Would we be just as critical?

As a researcher, I like seeing shorter communications like these, as it illuminates the thinking process of the researcher. Read ML papers for the ideas, not the results :)

I personally don't mind blog posts that have a bit of hyped-up publicity. It's thanks to groups like DeepMind and OpenAI that have captured public imagination on the subject and accelerated such interest in prospective students in studying ML + AI + robotics. If the hype is indeed unjustified, then it'll become irrelevant in the long-term. One caveat is that researchers should be very careful to not mislead reporters who are looking for the next "killer robots" story. But that doesn't really apply here.