High-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has launched an open-source training "gym" for artificial-intelligence programmers. It's an interesting move for a man who in 2014 said artificial intelligence, or A.I., will pose a threat to the human race. "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence," Musk said about a year and a half ago during an MIT symposium. "If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that... with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories with the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he's sure he can control the demon. Today, Musk is moving to help programmers use A.I. and machine learning to build smart robots and smart devices. "We're releasing the public beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms," wrote Greg Brockman, OpenAI's CTO, and John Schulman, a scientist working with OpenAI, in a blog post . "We originally built OpenAI Gym as a tool to accelerate our own RL research.

Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) research group today announced that for all future research it will use TensorFlow, a machine learning library that Google open-sourced last year, instead of Torch, an older framework. The move suggests that some of Google's brightest AI minds are convinced of the promise of Google's own open source software; TensorFlow is now good enough for DeepMind. "We believe that TensorFlow will enable us to execute our ambitious research goals at much larger scale and an even faster pace, providing us with a unique opportunity to further accelerate our research programme," Koray Kavukcuoglu, a research scientist at Google DeepMind and one of Torch's core contributors, wrote in a blog post. This is important because of DeepMind's considerable capabilities -- earlier this year its AlphaGo AI player of the ancient Chinese board game Go beat top-ranked Go player Lee Sedol. To be sure, DeepMind is not Google's only AI research unit.

It's no secret that Google has broad ambitions in healthcare. But a document obtained by New Scientist reveals that the tech giant's collaboration with the UK's National Health Service goes far beyond what has been publicly announced. The document – a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust – gives the clearest picture yet of what the company is doing and what sensitive data it now has access to. The agreement gives DeepMind access to a wide range of healthcare data on the 1.6 million patients who pass through three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – each year. This will include information about people who are HIV-positive, for instance, as well as details of drug overdoses and abortions. The agreement also includes access to patient data from the last five years.

The firm says it launched this is because progress made in reinforcement learning lags for a few reasons. Firstly, OpenAI notes that existing, open-source testing environments lack diversity and are difficult to set up and use. What's more, there's a dearth of standardization, which makes reproducing the tests -- key for any sort of academic research -- between different projects in an apples to apples way pretty hard to do.

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. 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.

Elon Musk's OpenAI has created a'gym' to let developers train their AI systems on Atari games. The open source code, which is still in development, includes'environments' to create situations in which AI can learn. The environments include playing classic board games, controlling a robot in simulation and playing 59 Atari games like Asteroids, Air Raid, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Pitfall. The hope is that the tasks will give OpenAI and others a way to rank and improve various AI approaches, and unveil new ways to teach machines to learn. OpenAI will also feature a leaderboard of the most successful systems.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company has opened up a virtual'gym' to enable developers to train their AIs using vintage video games like Pac-Man. OpenAI launched the open source code workout spot in order to offer'environments' in which tech boffins can test their AIs. The environments on offer include a range of 59 classic Atari games such as Pong and Asteroids. The code-based gym also includes the strategy board game Go. Google's DeepMind AI software recently beat the reigning human Go champion in a series of matches.

Microsoft is the world's most valuable company, with a 261 billion market cap. And an IBM computer named Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, reigning world chess champion and, at the time, the highest-ranked chess player to have ever lived. Though it was not the first time man has lost to machine, it is perhaps the most prominent, highly publicized by IBM and widely covered by the global media. It was viewed as a milestone for AI, the true arrival of computer intelligence. The world celebrated the achievement of technology -- or offered doomsday predictions of a robot revolution.

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.