Last December, Tesla CEO Elon Musk teamed up with Y Combinator president Sam Altman and former Google Brain Team scientist Ilya Sutskever to launch OpenAI, a 1 billion non-profit organization dedicated to furthering our understanding of artificial intelligence with a promise to share its research openly with the world. Today, it's taken its first step in that direction by launching a free toolkit for developers to build and train their own AI bots with games and algorithmic challenges. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. The OpenAI Gym, currently in beta, includes environments to simulate situations for your AI to learn from, as well as a site to compare and reproduce results. The tools are designed for use with Reinforcement Learning (RL), one of the technologies used to develop Google's AlphaGo AI that defeated Go world champion Lee Se-Dol recently.

That's because artificial intelligence programs, like the tech industry itself, suffer from a diversity problem. OpenAI says there are essentially two problems with programming A.I. right now: There's not enough variety, and the language to communicate with other developers is not the same.

In any scientific arena, good research is able to be replicated. If others can mimic your experiment and get the same results, that bodes well for the validity of the finding. And if others can tweak your study to get better results, that's of even more benefit to the community. These ideas are the driving force behind OpenAI Gym, a new platform for artificial intelligence research. OpenAI, announced earlier this year, is the brainchild of Elon Musk, Y Combinator's Sam Altman, and former Googler Ilya Sutskever.

The next big trend in AI looks likely to be computers and robots that teach themselves through trial and error. Elon Musk and Sam Altman (of Y Combinator) caused a stir last December by luring several high-profile researchers to join OpenAI, a billion-dollar nonprofit dedicated to releasing cutting-edge artificial intelligence research for free. Today the nonprofit released the first fruits of its work, and it suggests that kind of learning will be important for the future of AI. The nonprofit has released a tool called OpenAI Gym for developing and comparing different so-called reinforcement learning algorithms, which provide a way for a machine to learn through positive and negative feedback. This week OpenAI also announced two new recruits, including Pieter Abbeel, an associate professor at Berkeley and a leading expert on applying reinforcement learning to robots. OpenAI Gym includes code and examples to help others get started with reinforcement learning.

The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December. But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn't that no one was looking. It was that everyone was looking. When some of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI's freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers--some made at the conference itself--were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup.

The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December. But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn't that no one was looking. It was that everyone was looking. When some of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI's freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers--some made at the conference itself--were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup.

The Friday afternoon information dump, a grand custom noticed by politicians and capitalists alike, is often presupposed to disguise unhealthy information. So it was a little bit bizarre that Elon Musk, founder of electrical automotive maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new synthetic intelligence firm on the tail finish of a weeklong AI convention in Montreal this previous December. However there was a cause they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn't that nobody was wanting. It was that everybody was trying. When a few of Silicon Valley's strongest firms caught wind of the venture, they started providing great quantities of cash to OpenAI's freshly assembled cadre of synthetic intelligence researchers, intent on maintaining these huge thinkers for themselves. The last-minute gives--some made on the convention itself--have been massive sufficient to power Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the brand new startup.

The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December. But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn't that no one was looking. It was that everyone was looking. When some of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI's freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers--some made at the conference itself--were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup.

Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Can It Take Over? Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk first warned us about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Elon Musk then turned around and with other technologists put 1B into starting a nonprofit research effort – OpenAI just to "keep an eye on it"! Facebook, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Shopify and others are charging full steam at AI and even open sourcing it! So what is all the AI ruckus about? AI has been subject matter for science fiction for a long time now. Every SciFi show you can think of has a intelligent computer or robot as a sidekick or with some prominent role.

Elon Musk has not been shy about his concerns over artificial intelligence turning evil. So it wasn't a surprise in December when Musk announced the formation of OpenAI, an open-source, non-profit focused on advancing "digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole." That's all well and good, but not much has been revealed about what exactly OpenAI is working on. OpenAI's co-founder and CTO Greg Brockman told Tech Insider that OpenAI is primarily focusing on advancing machine learning, which is the technology that enables computers to learn how to complete tasks through experience. Specifically, the company is focusing on two key types of machine learning that every major tech company is investing in right now.