Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company, way back in December.
We're just now seeing the results of it.
The company released the beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for comparing reinforcement learning algorithms, Wednesday.
The toolkit allows researchers to test their algorithms by having them play games, control a robot simulation, or complete tasks, OpenAI said in its blog post.
Researchers have been using games to test the strength of their AI for years. We saw that in 1996 when IBM's Deep Blue computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. More recently, Google's AlphaGo beat a world champion at the ancient game of Go for the very first time — something many AI experts, as well as Musk, thought was a decade away from being possible.
Researchers can use the OpenAI Gym to have their AI play games like Atari or Go, control two-dimensional and three-dimensional robot simulations, complete small tasks, and perform computations. The platform will allow researchers to compare their results and work with others.
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OpenAI's co-founder and CTO Greg Brockman told Tech Insider earlier this month that the company is working on two types of AI: reinforcement learning (when machines learn to conquer tasks through repeated trial and error) and unsupervised learning (teaching machines to think like humans).
The OpenAI Gym was initially designed so the company could test its own algorithms, but it was made open source to help speed up reinforcement learning research.
Since it was formed, OpenAI has remained committed to making its projects open source to democratize AI research so everyone can have a slice of the pie, not just big names like Google and Facebook. Open sourcing the projects also allows OpenAI to stick to its mission of advancing "digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole."
OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman previously told Tech Insider that the company hopes doing so will prevent the "global warming type of effects or outcome that no human really wants."
"It’s about first saying these systems are becoming capable and a part of our life and we should be thinking about this," he said. "And there’s not much that can be done to think of safety standards for tech doesn't exist yet, but acknowledging that this is going to become important."
Musk has not been shy about his concerns over artificial intelligence turning evil. He's even compared AI to "summoning the demon."
"Our goal is to maximize the probability of things turning out well," Brockman previously told Tech Insider. "So obviously the flipside is making sure whatever issues are minimized and avoided."
Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal to allow OpenAI to train its models on its media brands' reporting.
