Dive Brief:
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Google announced this weekend it will open source its DeepMind Lab AI platform to enable researchers and the general public to use it and add to it.
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DeepMind Lab is a 3D game-like platform tailored for "agent-based AI research." Its DeepMind Lab assets, including code, maps and level scripts, will be hosted on GitHub.
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"Our hope is that the community will help us shape and develop the platform going forward," according to a Google blog. "There are opportunities for significant contributions still to be made in a number of mostly still untouched research domains now available through DeepMind Lab, such as navigation, memory and exploration."
Dive Insight:
Remember DeepMind? It's the AI responsible for beating a human at Go, the notoriously difficult Chinese board game. Now, Google is making that technology available to all to help it grow in capabilities.
AI and open source are more frequently crossing paths to help grow technology beyond the bounds of a single group of researchers. And Google, Microsoft and Facebook have all recently made major moves around open source.
Last month, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said the tech giants have changed their outlook on open source because it’s now "where user-driven innovation happens in software," according to an interview published by Fortune.
