Elon Musk's OpenAI will introduce Universe, a virtual training ground aimed at teaching AI to play video games, use apps and even interact with websites. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company backed by the Tesla founder and billionaire entrepreneur, defines Universe in a blog post as "a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites and other applications." Put simply, Universe will provide a gym that allows AI agents to go beyond their specialized knowledge of an individual environment to something approaching common sense. "Any task a human can complete with a computer." Using a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) remote desktop, it allows the AI to control the game or app using a virtual keyboard and mouse, and to see its output by analyzing the pixels displayed on the screen.

DeepMind is inviting you down the rabbit hole and into its 3D digital world. Its hope is to encourage artificial intelligence to grow and thrive in an environment that's nearly as rich as the one human intelligence evolved in. DeepMind is an AI moonshot project under the Alphabet umbrella, formed from a London-based startup that Google bought in 2014. Remember when AI beat a human champ at the complex strategy game of Go earlier this year? The company now is giving outside software developers access to DeepMind Lab, a virtual space where AI agents learn to navigate the world, according to a blog post published Saturday.

Two of the biggest names in artificial intelligence are opening their doors to everyone. Google's DeepMind, the AI system that famously defeated the world champion of the board game Go earlier this year, and OpenAI, an AI collaboration from Elon Musk and others, are making their software platforms available to researchers, developers, and anyone else who wants to use them. The two companies made their announcements in separate blog posts Monday. The two platforms both use deep learning, a form of machine learning that allows AI systems to grow smarter. In its post, DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014, wrote that its goal is to create "systems that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how."

In DeepMind Lab, AI agents observe the world as an image, in pixels, rendered from their own first-person perspective. They also may receive a reward (or punishment) signal. Two big entities making advances in artificial intelligence are opening up their AI training platforms, with the aim of getting closer to developing general intelligence. DeepMind, Alphabet's artificial intelligence division, announced Monday that it's open-sourcing DeepMind Lab, its 3D game-like platform for agent-based AI research. In a blog post, the DeepMind team argued that developing general intelligence -- the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and operate in an environment without pre-programming -- should be easier in a 3D world observed from a first-person viewpoint (like DeepMind Lab).

Agents use the same senses and controls as humans: seeing pixels and using a keyboard and mouse. Universe makes it possible to train a single agent on any task a human can complete with a computer.

The Google logo is displayed at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. According to PCMag, Google's DeepMind Lab serves as a testing ground for building better and smarter artificial intelligence (AI). DeepMind has been working on AI for six years. Its artificial intelligence technology can excel at arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, as well as more complex games such as Chinese board game Go. Google's DeepMind Lab has also built rich simulated environments with the aim to serve as a kind of "laboratories" for AI research," according to company's blog post.

DeepMind Lab is a 3D learning environment based on id Software's Quake III Arena via ioquake3 and other open source software. DeepMind Lab provides a suite of challenging 3D navigation and puzzle-solving tasks for learning agents. Its primary purpose is to act as a testbed for research in artificial intelligence, especially deep reinforcement learning. Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product. If you use DeepMind Lab in your research and would like to cite the DeepMind Lab environment, we suggest you cite the DeepMind Lab paper.

Every parent's worst nightmare is a student spending more time playing video games and surfing the web than studying for school. But the team over at OpenAI believes that a "fun parent" approach could actually bring us all one step closer to the elusive generalized intelligence. Its new tool, Universe, was created to train and measure AI frameworks with video games, applications and websites. At a high level, OpenAI, the billion-dollar side-project of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, aims to reduce the potential harms of artificial intelligence by democratizing it. Universe is being released with Atari 2600 games, 1,000 flash games and 80 browser environments with the goal of expediting the creation of generalized intelligence that can excel at more than one task.

Hoping to teach AI agents the common sense they need to solve arbitrary tasks without specific training, OpenAI on Monday will introduce Universe, a collection of virtualized video games, browser interfaces, and applications that serve as a training ground for code-based decision making. Universe is open-source middleware that supports Gym, the organization's toolkit for developing and evaluating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. RL is used to train software perform specific actions, such as playing a videogame or making a 3D model walk, under a framework that prioritizes actions through a reward scheme. Universe aims to accelerate the education of AI agents by broadening the number of available training resources. Previously, according to OpenAI, the largest RL resource consisted of 55 Atari games, the Atari Learning Environment.

Every parent's worst nightmare is a student spending more time playing video games and surfing the web than studying for school. But the team over at OpenAI believes that a "fun parent" approach could actually bring us all one step closer to elusive generalized intelligence. Its new tool, Universe, was created to train and measure AI frameworks with video games, applications and websites. At a high level, OpenAI, the billion dollar side-project of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, aims to reduce the potential harms of artificial intelligence by democratizing it. Universe is being released with Atari 2600 games, 1,000 flash games and 80 browser environments with the goal of expediting the creation of generalized intelligence that can excel at more than one task.