Google has announced on Monday, Dec. 5, its decision to offer access to the company's DeepMind Lab as an open source publicly available for the artificial intelligence research community.
Open Source DeepMind AI
According to PCMag, Google's DeepMind Lab serves as a testing ground for building better and smarter artificial intelligence (AI). DeepMind has been working on AI for six years. Its artificial intelligence technology can excel at arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, as well as more complex games such as Chinese board game Go.
Google's DeepMind Lab has also built rich simulated environments with the aim to serve as a kind of "laboratories" for AI research," according to company's blog post. In the same blog post, Google announced that it is opening now its flagship AI platform for the broader research community.
Among the artificial general intelligence research areas in DeepMind Lab are included motor control, memory, time, strategy, planning, 3D vision from a first-person viewpoint and fully autonomous agents that must learn for themselves by exploring their environment. According to Google, combining all these factors is a big challenge.
In order to deal with this task, DeepMind Lab is designed to be highly customizable and extendable. Off-the-shelf editor tools can be used to create new levels. By opening the platform publicly, Google hopes that the research community will help shape and develop DeepMind AI.
The source code that is named now DeepMind Lab has been previously called Labyrinth. According to Bloomberg, the entire source code for DeepMind training environment is offered now on the open-source depository GitHub. Anyone has now access to download the code and is allowed to customize it in order to help in designing and training their own AI systems.
AI developers will also be able to build new DeepMind game levels and upload them to GitHub. Making available its Lab code on GitHub will allow researchers in the artificial intelligence field to check if its developer's own breakthroughs can be easily replicated. These scientists will have the possibility to measure the performance of their own AI agents by using the exact same tests DeepMind uses.
Google's decision to make its AI testing platform available to the public is further evidence that the company is ready to embrace more openness around its research. Google previously announced a partnership with Activision Blizzard to provide the popular video game Starcraft II as a test platform for AI researchers.
Other AI Initiatives
Google isn't the only company focusing on developing AI software. Uber and OpenAI have also similar initiatives. For instance, Elon Musk's OpenAI released Universe, an AI software that measures and trains a system's general intelligence across websites, games, and other applications. The company explained in a blog post that its aim is to develop an AI system able to "master unfamiliar, difficult environments."
Uber announced its acquisition of Geometric Intelligence, an AI research startup. The 16-member team previously belonging to Geometric Intelligence will comprise now the new Uber AI Labs located in San Francisco. Jeff Holden, Uber Chief Product Officer, said that the creation of Uber AI Labs will make moving people and things safer, faster and accessible to all.
