That's something so many people are working on. In Silicon Valley, chatbot is now a bona fide buzzword. But Mordatch is different. He's not a linguist. He doesn't deal in the AI techniques that typically reach for language. He's a roboticist who began his career as an animator. He spent time at Pixar and worked on Toy Story 3, in between stints as an academic at places like Stanford and the University of Washington, where he taught robots to move like humans. "Creating movement from scratch is what I was always interested in," he says. Now, all this expertise is coming together in an unexpected way.

Born in Ukraine and raised in Toronto, the 31-year-old is now a visiting researcher at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab started by Tesla founder Elon Musk and Y combinator president Sam Altman. There, Mordatch is exploring a new path to machines that can not only converse with humans, but with each other. He's building virtual worlds where software bots learn to create their own language out of necessity.