Elon Musk's Research Venture Has Trained AI To Teach Itself

As part of its effort to find better ways to develop and train "safe artificial general intelligence," OpenAI has been releasing its own versions of reinforcement learning algorithms. They call these OpenAI Baselines, and the most recent additions to these algorithms are two baselines that are meant to enhance machine learning performance by making it more efficient. The first is a baseline implementation called Actor Critic using Kronecker-factored Trust Region (ACKTR). Developed by researchers from the University of Toronto (UofT) and New York University (NYU), ACKTR improves on the way AI policies perform deep reinforcement learning -- learning that is accomplished only by trial and error, and obtained only through raw observation. In a paper published online, the UofT and NYU researchers used simulated robots and Atari games to test how ACKTR learns control policies.