Both Google and OpenAI announced plans to open-source their deep learning code Monday. Elon Musk's OpenAI released Universe, a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across games, websites and other applications. Google's parent Alphabet is putting its entire DeepMind Lab training environment codebase on GiftHub, making it easier for anyone to train their own AI systems. DeepMind may have defeated a world champion at the difficult game Go, but to advance its learning further, Alphabet says that AI agents require more detailed environments to help with AI research. The company is opening-sourcing DeepMind Lab to programmers that want to use it.

OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company, wants to let AIs loose in their own universe, where they can learn to play games, use apps and interact with websites. Universe is the name of OpenAI's tool for training AIs on, as it puts it, "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. The source code for Universe posted to Github on Monday, and includes interfaces to a thousand online environments, the company said. Among them are simple browser tasks such as clicking buttons, or copying and pasting items -- but there are also more complex environments, such as the video game Grand Theft Auto V. Training AIs how best to steal cars and shoot bystanders might seem a strange direction to take, given that OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and that one of its goals is to enable a general-purpose robot to wield tools -- initially to perform housework.

Alphabet Inc.'s artificial intelligence division Google DeepMind is making the maze-like game platform it uses for many of its experiments available to other researchers and the general public. DeepMind is putting the entire source code for its training environment -- which it previously called Labyrinth and has now renamed as DeepMind Lab -- on the open-source depository GitHub, the company said Monday. Anyone will be able to download the code and customize it to help train their own artificial intelligence systems. They will also be able to create new game levels for DeepMind Lab and upload these to GitHub. The decision to make this AI test bed available to the public is further evidence of DeepMind's decision to embrace more openness around its research.

Artificial intelligence developed by the likes of Google's DeepMind and Elon Musk's OpenAI is taught within the confines of game worlds – including navigating around mazes, dodging deadly cliffs, playing laser tag and flying through space. In a mission to build a general AI capable of solving any problem put in front of it, DeepMind is open-sourcing its game code to everyone. The software and 14 levels from DeepMind Labs will be put on GitHub later this week. And, not to be outdone, Elon Musk's own OpenAI is also releasing its own'computer training ground' called Universe. Universe is open-source software that supports Gym; OpenAI's toolkit for testing its algorithms which help software play games, for example, using a reward scheme.

Machines may soon be trying to master just about anything you can do on a computer. Open AI, a nonprofit dedicated to pursuing big advances in AI and making that progress freely available to anyone, has released Universe, a platform that will let AI programs learn, through experimentation and positive reward, how to do all sorts of things on a computer. Universe will include more than a thousand games, but also desktop programs such as Web browsers. It will make it possible for AI researchers to train programs to do all sorts of new tricks, including potentially useful tasks like filling out online forms, responding to e-mails, and updating spreadsheets. But Ilya Sutskevar, cofounder and research director at OpenAI, says the motivation for developing and releasing Universe is a lot bigger.

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers around the world will soon be able to use DeepMind's "flagship" platform to develop innovative computer systems that can learn and think for themselves. DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for £400 million in 2014, announced on Monday that it is open-sourcing its "Lab" from this week onwards so that others can try and make advances in the notoriously complex field of AI. The company says that the DeepMind Lab, which it has been using internally for some time, is a 3D game-like platform tailored for agent-based AI research. Founded in 2010, DeepMind has been developing AI agents that can master arcade games like "Space Invaders," "Pac-Man," and more recently the incredibly complex Chinese board game of Go. Describing the Lab platform in a blog post, DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg and DeepMind employees Charles Beattie, Joel Leibo, Stig Petersen, wrote: "It is observed from a first-person viewpoint, through the eyes of the simulated agent. Scenes are rendered with rich science fiction-style visuals. The available actions allow agents to look around and move in 3D. The agent's'body' is a floating orb. It levitates and moves by activating thrusters opposite its desired direction of movement, and it has a camera that moves around the main sphere as a ball-in-socket joint tracking the rotational look actions. "Example tasks include collecting fruit, navigating in mazes, traversing dangerous passages while avoiding falling off cliffs, bouncing through space using launch pads to move between platforms, playing laser tag, and quickly learning and remembering random procedurally generated environments." The DeepMind Lab aims to combine several different AI research areas into one environment. Researchers will be able to test their AI agent's abilities on navigation, memory, and 3D vision, while determining how good they are at planning and strategy. "Each are considered frontier research questions in their own right," DeepMind wrote in the blog post. "Putting them all together in one platform, as we have, represents a significant new challenge for the field." The Lab can be adapted and extended, with the possibility to create new "levels" that can be "customised with gameplay logic, item pickups, custom observations, level restarts, reward schemes, in-game messages and more." "We believe it has already had a significant impact on our thinking concerning numerous aspects of intelligence, both natural and artificial," wrote the blog posts' authors. "However, our efforts so far have only barely scratched the surface of what is possible in DeepMind Lab.

From deep science to real-world breakthroughs: how artificial intelligence (AI) can have a positive impact on energy management. Watch Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, exclusive talk on how Google used AI in their data centres to achieve 40% of energy reduction. You can find more talks from X Energy website with the likes of; John Elkington of Volans on the "exponential mindset", Scott Balloch of BT and Caroline Hill of Land Securities on the case for leadership and more. Tiffany is Event Manager at The Crowd. For further information, please contact Tiffany - tiffany@thecrowd.me

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. They are awesome!! Please subscribe! That's what keeps me going.

In OpenAI's Universe, Computers Learn to Use Apps Like Humans Do Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

We are indeed living in interesting times, where we celebrate human-built machines defeating the best human minds at variety of activities. IBM Deep Blue's win against Chess champion Gary kasparov in 1997, IBM watson acing Jeopardy in 2011 and now Google DeepMind reportedly wining'Go' with high precision, being cited as a major breakthrough in AI, which even Facebook claims their team came close to acing the game as well. DeepMind goes against the'Go' champion, to be streamed live for the world to witness. While these feats are undoubtedly remarkable, and as understandable its creating quite a buzz in the AI community; as it provides the glimpse to the future seen only in sci-fi. As exciting as it may sound, it leaves a few questions before us.