Metz goes on, "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 amount of money was borderline crazy,' says Wojciech Zaremba, a researcher who was joining OpenAI after internships at both Google and Facebook and was among those who received big offers at the eleventh hour. How many dollars is'borderline crazy'? Two years ago, as the market for the latest machine learning technology really started to heat up, Microsoft Research vice president Peter Lee said that the cost of a top AI researcher had eclipsed the cost of a top quarterback prospect in the National Football League--and he meant under regular circumstances, not when two of the most famous entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were trying to poach your top talent. Zaremba says that as OpenAI was coming together, he was offered two or three times his market value."

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. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! 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. RL works on the principle that a bot will receive a reward every time it completes an action successfully – similar to how you might train a dog.

OpenAI, a 1 billion ( 687 million) artificial intelligence company backed by Elon Musk, has built a "gym" where developers can train their AI systems to get smarter. Using OpenAI's open source toolkit, available for download now, developers can access "environments" where they can test their AI bots. The OpenAI Gym, currently in beta, provides a number of environments, including more than 50 Atari games, such as "Space Invaders," "Pong," "Asteroids" and "Pac-Man". Developers can also test their AIs on board games like Go, which was recently mastered by an agent built by London startup Google DeepMind. "Over time, we plan to greatly expand this collection of environments," wrote OpenAI's Greg Brockman and John Schulman in a blog post.

OpenAI, the nonprofit artificial intelligence research company established last year with backing from several Silicon Valley figures, today announced its first product: a proving ground for algorithms for reinforcement learning, which involves training machines to do things based on trial and error. OpenAI is releasing tools you can run locally to test out algorithms in various "environments" -- including Atari games like Air Raid, Breakout, and Ms. Pacman -- and a Web service for sharing test results. The system automatically scores evaluations and also seeks to have results reviewed and reproduced by other people. "We originally built OpenAI Gym as a tool to accelerate our own RL research. We hope it will be just as useful for the broader community," OpenAI's Greg Brockman and John Schulman wrote in a blog post. To be sure, there are other online places for showing off algorithms, including Algorithmia.

Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk, is now establishing an artificial intelligence'gym' for developers to train their AI systems through a series of games and challenges. Under Musk's 1 billion non-profit OpenAI initiative, the gym is now available as open source code and provides'environments' for developers to test their new AI bots. This includes 59 Atari games including the popular Alien, Air Raid, Asteroids and Pac-Man. The results from these test environments will be compiled by OpenAI into a list of the top performing systems. Instead of ranking the AIs by high scores, the systems will be judged on versatility.

This tutorial doesn't seem to be linked from any of their pages, but was mentioned in their chat. It's very concise, but covers some key concepts related to Deep RL, and has exercises that can be implemented using the gym environment.

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.