High-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has his sights set on building robots that can do housework, have conversations, and play games. In working on these different robotic abilities, Musk, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors, said he hopes to advance the artificial intelligence algorithms that will be needed to create them. Musk is working on this project alongside Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and Sam Altman, as part of OpenAI, an open-source A.I. research company. In a blog post Monday they wrote: "A significant fraction of our research bandwidth is being spent on fundamental research. We'll always be developing and testing new ideas... This is important--our current ideas will not be enough to achieve our long-term goal."

SAN FRANCISCO – Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and other prominent tech executives are pouring $1 billion into a nonprofit aimed at creating artificial intelligence that augments humans' capabilities, rather than making them obsolete. The effort announced Friday, called OpenAI, joins significant investments from companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which have used artificial intelligence to sharpen their businesses with services such as facial recognition or language processing. But the OpenAI founders suggested they have set their sights on bigger problems. "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," a blog post on Open-AI's website (bit.ly/1lBMdz9) said.

Michael Schmidt is the founder and CTO of Nutonian. Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest topics in both business and science. Developers and industry analysts are all-in, building castles in the sky with tales of an impending AI "awakening." In preparation for this sea change, Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded OpenAI, a nonprofit with the dual mission of ensuring that AI stays safe and its benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. While it's important to develop AI and harness its powers responsibly, it's incorrect for OpenAI to focus solely on one or two types of AI, like reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is among the least used types of AI, and it offers few immediate safety threats or value to people and businesses.

As of last month Alphabet Inc.'s AI division, Google DeepMind, has open-sourced their new machine learning platform DeepMind Lab. Artificial Intelligence is the technology of the moment, constantly debated and attracting massive attention from investors. Despite warnings from influential figures including Professor Stephen Hawking, Google's decision to open up their software to other developers is part of a mass movement to advance the capabilities of AI. Facebook open sourced its own deep learning software last year, and Elon Musk's non-profit organisation OpenAI recently released Universe, an open software platform that can be used to train AI systems. So, why have Google, OpenAI and others made these platforms public, and how will this affect the adoption of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning as a whole?

Thanks to advanced new machine learning techniques, artificial intelligences are better at performing human tasks than ever. AIs can tell you what's in your photos, beat you at chess, design typefaces, dream up entirely new cities, and even tweet like Donald Trump--often better than the average person. They can't apply what they've learned from one problem to another--which is why even the best AIs are idiot savants: really smart in one arena, and dumb as sticks in all others. So how can AIs reach this elusive general intelligence? OpenAI--an artificial intelligence research nonprofit backed by Microsoft, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel--thinks it involves AIs playing video games.

In this video, I show you a side project I've been working on. It's a program that uses "NeuroEvolution of Augmented Topologies" to solve OpenAI environments (simple games) with neural networks. By feeding observation data from game environment into my program, over time it's able to learn how to play itself. Since all of my code is open source on Github, anyone can use this to run their own simulations. Hacker House is supported by fans on Patreon.

In this video, we first go over the history of video game AI, then I introduce OpenAI's Universe, which lets you build a bot that can play thousands of different video games. It has environments for all sorts of games, from Space Invaders, to Grand Theft Auto, to Protein folding simulations. For your README, just include a 1-3 sentence description of your strategy and instructions on how to run the code.The demo code can be found in the README of the Universe repo. OpenAI asked me to make this video and I gladly said yes. They are awesome!! Please subscribe! That's what keeps me going.

Jack Clark and I are both lapsed technology journalists, and he writes one of my favorite new newsletters of this year, Import AI, which summarizes major research, hires and products in the space. He now works for OpenAI, alongside a team of researchers, where he handles policy, communications and partnerships. OpenAI is an AI research lab set up by former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Its mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Q: Before you joined OpenAI, you were a journalist -- like me. In fact, you called yourself the world's first and "only neural network reporter" while you were at Bloomberg. What made you decide to cross over? I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence.

Mini World of Bits ("MiniWoB") is a benchmark for reinforcement learning agents who interact with websites. The agents perceive the raw pixels of a small (210x160 pixel) webpage and produce keyboard and mouse actions. The environments are written in HTML/Javascript/CSS and are designed to test the agent's capacity to interact with common web browser elements, such as buttons, text fields, slides, date pickers, etc. The environments of this benchmark are accessible through the OpenAI Universe. Each environment is an HTML page that is 210 pixels high, 160px wide (i.e.

Thanks to advanced new machine learning techniques, artificial intelligences are better at performing human tasks than ever. AIs can tell you what's in your photos, beat you at chess, design typefaces, dream up entirely new cities, and even tweet like Donald Trump--often better than the average person. They can't apply what they've learned from one problem to another--which is why even the best AIs are idiot savants: really smart in one arena, and dumb as sticks in all others. So how can AIs reach this elusive general intelligence? OpenAI--an artificial intelligence research nonprofit backed by Microsoft, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel--thinks it involves AIs playing video games.