Elon Musk's $1 billion AI company launches a "gym" where developers train their computers

OpenAI, a $1 billion (£687 million) artificial intelligence company backed by Elon Musk, has built a "gym" where developers can train their AI systems to get smarter.

Using OpenAI's open source toolkit, available for download now, developers can access "environments" where they can test their AI bots.

The OpenAI Gym, currently in beta, provides a number of environments, including more than 50 Atari games, such as "Space Invaders," "Pong," "Asteroids" and "Pac-Man".

Developers can also test their AIs on board games like Go, which was recently mastered by an agent built by London startup Google DeepMind.

"Over time, we plan to greatly expand this collection of environments," wrote OpenAI's Greg Brockman and John Schulman in a blog post. "Contributions from the community are more than welcome."

OpenAI - also backed by Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Y-Combinator founder Sam Altman, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman - said it plans to create a leaderboard of the most successful AI systems. The leaderboard will be based on how versatile systems are as opposed to how highly they score.

The OpenAI Gym is specifically for developers working in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). According to OpenAI, RL is the "subfield of machine learning concerned with decision making and motor control. It studies how an agent can learn how to achieve goals in a complex, uncertain environment."

OpenAI said it originally built OpenAI Gym to accelerate its own RL work. "We hope it will be just as useful for the broader community," said Brockman and Schulman.