OpenAI's Universe is the fun parent every artificial intelligence deserves

Every parent's worst nightmare is a student spending more time playing video games and surfing the web than studying for school. But the team over at OpenAI believes that a "fun parent" approach could actually bring us all one step closer to the elusive generalized intelligence. Its new tool, Universe, was created to train and measure AI frameworks with video games, applications and websites. At a high level, OpenAI, the billion-dollar side-project of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, aims to reduce the potential harms of artificial intelligence by democratizing it. Universe is being released with Atari 2600 games, 1,000 flash games and 80 browser environments with the goal of expediting the creation of generalized intelligence that can excel at more than one task.