Dive Brief:

• OpenAI announced its first product, OpenAI Gym, on Wednesday.

• OpenAI Gym is a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms in different environments, according to the company.

• OpenAI is the nonprofit AI research company founded late last year with the goal of advancing digital intelligence without concerns about profit. The project touts investors like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Infosys and AWS.

Dive Insight:

OpenAI Gym is designed to be a proving ground for algorithms for reinforcement learning, which involves training machines to run trial and error tests. 

The product consists of a growing suite of environments (from simulated robots to Atari games), and a site for comparing and reproducing results, according to OpenAI’s blog, and the system automatically scores evaluations and seeks to have results reviewed and reproduced by other people, democratizing AI, in a sense.

"We originally built OpenAI Gym as a tool to accelerate our own RL research. We hope it will be just as useful for the broader community," OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and John Schulman wrote in the blog.

OpenAI Gym provides a diverse suite of environments that range from easy to difficult and involve many different kinds of data. While there are other sites for sharing algorithms, there are not very good benchmarks in this area and environments are not standardized, Brockman and Schulman wrote.

"OpenAI Gym is an attempt to fix both problems," they said.