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.

A panel comprised of government tech leaders and healthcare experts is set to scrutinise the work of Google DeepMind's healthcare team at an upcoming meeting, which could be held within the next month. DeepMind, a British AI startup acquired by Google in 2014 for 400 million, is processing NHS data through a new division called DeepMind Health. The London-based AI lab says its technology has the potential to improve the way patients are diagnosed and treated but it acknowledges that working in healthcare requires regular and independent oversight. As a result, it set up a reviewer board for DeepMind Health when it launched the unit in February. DeepMind states on its website that the board will meet four times a year but Business Insider understands that an official meeting between the nine individuals on the board is yet to take place.

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.

Google wants to put its artificial intelligence technology to use in top hospitals. Earlier this week, the search giant announced it would work with the U.K.'s National Health Service, or NHS, to alert staff to patients at risk of serious complications due to kidney failure. Details about the technology are fairly thin on the ground at this stage. But it is known that Google DeepMind recently acquired an app called Hark, which is a task management app that aims to replace paper-based systems and pagers. Hark was developed over four years by a team at Imperial College London, which is one of the U.K.'s top medical schools.

Researchers will pit their A.I. algorithms against the game Doom, to showcase how computers can adapt to visual environments. Video games are a good way to train artificial intelligence algorithms to learn about a visual world--researchers can simulate any situation they want, and it's endlessly repeatable. Google DeepMind is famous for this approach, teaching its A.I. to play Atari. Now researchers are competing to make their algorithms play Doom, the iconic shooting game originally for PC. DeepMind has already trained its algorithm to walk around in a maze based on Doom, but this competition would have the A.I. play death match rounds with rocket launchers.