Elon Musk's $1 billion AI startup has developed a system that trains robots in VR

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company set up by Elon Musk, has come up with a new method for teaching robots -- giving them a demo in virtual reality. The non-profit, which is funded to the tune of $1 billion, trained a self-learning algorithm to complete a task after a human demonstrated it once in virtual reality. In this case, the task was stacking coloured blocks. The team got a programmed robot to reproduce the behaviour shown during the demonstration in the virtual environment. "We've developed and deployed a new algorithm, one-shot imitation learning, allowing a human to communicate how to do a new task by performing it in VR," OpenAI wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.