Elon Musk and Google Want You to Make Their Artificial Intelligence Smarter

Two of the biggest names in artificial intelligence are opening their doors to everyone.

Google’s DeepMind, the AI system that famously defeated the world champion of the board game Go earlier this year, and OpenAI, an AI collaboration from Elon Musk and others, are making their software platforms available to researchers, developers, and anyone else who wants to use them. The two companies made their announcements in separate blog posts Monday.

The two platforms both use deep learning, a form of machine learning that allows AI systems to grow smarter. In its post, DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014, wrote that its goal is to create “systems that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how.” Training a system to be masterful at a board game, like DeepMind did with AlphaGo, is one thing. The goal, however, is to be able to feed the system a new set of instructions and enable it to adapt and learn on its own.

To train artificial intelligence, DeepMind uses a program called DeepMind Lab, a digital three-dimensional environment. DeepMind Lab will now be available for public use, so any researcher or developer can train bots to explore the video game-like world and complete tasks like navigating mazes and forgoing short-term rewards for longer-term ones.