Tesla Motors cofounder and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently collaborated with Y Combinator's Sam Altman and former Googler Ilya Sutskever to launch a non-profit platform for artificial intelligence research called OpenAI. Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a part of fictional films today. As a matter of fact, AI has become ubiquitous in almost all fields of sciences, offering its remarkable benefits that can revolutionize the world. Despite its protracted history, artificial Intelligence is a field that is still constantly and actively evolving. It is defined as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines through incorporating clever computer programs.

OpenAI announced its first product, OpenAI Gym, on Wednesday. OpenAI Gym is a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms in different environments, according to the company. OpenAI is the nonprofit AI research company founded late last year with the goal of advancing digital intelligence without concerns about profit. The project touts investors like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Infosys and AWS. OpenAI Gym is designed to be a proving ground for algorithms for reinforcement learning, which involves training machines to run trial and error tests.

A few months ago, Elon Musk and a few other big players in Silicon Valley announced their creation of OpenAI, a non-profit research firm that would provide an open platform for researchers to share and compare algorithms for artificial intelligence. "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," the team wrote in their introductory blog post. Now, the creators of OpenAI have announced a new platform for the organization, called OpenAI Gym. It's "a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms," as stated on the website. Interestingly, OpenAI Gym won't include leaderboards or competitions based on who can create the top scoring algorithm.

As with many companies over the last couple of years, InfoSys is seeing a major shift in away from "big data" to more of an emphasis on machine learning an AI research. But unlike their competitors, which are heavily investing in proprietary solutions such as Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning Studio, InfoSys decided a cooperative approach would be more efficient. The result of this decision is OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Officially launched in December, this research group has a billion dollars in funding from InfoSys, Amazon Web Services, and several private donors. The reason we're talking about OpenAI today is they just released the public beta of OpenAI Gym.

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.

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.

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.