OpenAI's 'state-of-the-art' system gives robots humanlike dexterity

OpenAI, a nonprofit, San Francisco-based AI research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, among other titans of industry, made headlines in June when it announced that the latest version of its Dota 2-playing AI -- dubbed OpenAI Five -- managed to beat amateur players. Today, it unveiled another first: a robotics system that can manipulate objects with humanlike dexterity. In a forthcoming paper ("Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation"), OpenAI researchers describe a system that uses a reinforcement model, where the AI learns through trial and error, to direct robot hands in grasping and manipulating objects with state-of-the-art precision. All the more impressive, it was trained entirely digitally, in a computer simulation, and wasn't provided any human demonstrations by which to learn. "While dexterous manipulation of objects is a fundamental everyday task for humans, it is still challenging for autonomous robots," the team writes.