Teaching AI To Play Video Games Could Make It Much Smarter

Thanks to advanced new machine learning techniques, artificial intelligences are better at performing human tasks than ever. AIs can tell you what's in your photos, beat you at chess, design typefaces, dream up entirely new cities, and even tweet like Donald Trump--often better than the average person. They can't apply what they've learned from one problem to another--which is why even the best AIs are idiot savants: really smart in one arena, and dumb as sticks in all others. So how can AIs reach this elusive general intelligence? OpenAI--an artificial intelligence research nonprofit backed by Microsoft, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel--thinks it involves AIs playing video games.