Self-driving cars are all the rage right now, though I really don’t see the tech taking off for a very long time.<\/p>\n
The problem is how to make an AI play nice with people on the road, who are inattentive, stupid, violent, vindictive, and frequently malicious.<\/p>\n
And once you do, how do you test it?<\/p>\n
Rolling it out on the road, with an operator in the drivers seat, is expensive.<\/p>\n
Just the liability insurance would be insane.<\/p>\n
Obviously, one solution, for the software at least, is to test it in a virtual environment, but this raises an important question: Where can one find a virtual reality that even comes close to mimicking the insanity that is humans driving cars?<\/p>\n
Three Words: Grand Theft Auto<\/span><\/b><\/a><\/i>:<\/p>\n Developers building self-driving cars can now take their AI agents for a spin in the simulated open world of Grand Theft Auto V<\/i> \u2013 via OpenAI\u2019s machine-learning playground, Universe. <\/p>\n The open-source MIT-licensed code<\/a> gluing GTA V to Universe<\/a> is maintained by Craig Quiter, who works for Otto \u2013 the Uber-owned startup that delivered 51,744 cans of Budweiser over 193km (120 miles) using a self-driving truck. <\/p>\n The software comes with a trained driving agent; all developers need is a copy of the game to get cracking. After that, programmers can swap out the demo AI model with their own agents to test their code and neural networks. Universe and Quiter’s integration code takes care of the fiddly interfacing with the game. <\/p>\n