Elon Musk-backed OpenAI is teaching robots how to learn just like humans do
OpenAI, the San Francisco-based nonprofit research lab backed by Elon Musk, today announced a research milestone on its robotics work. The achievement is a new algorithm that allows a human being to communicate a task to an AI by performing it first in virtual reality. The method is based on what’s known as one-time imitation learning, a technique OpenAI developed to allow software guiding a robot to mimic a physical action using just a single example.
In this case, OpenAI is trying to teach a robotic arm how to stack a series of colored cube-shaped blocks. A human being wearing a VR headset first performs the task manually within a virtual environment. OpenAI then has its vision…
