Rockstar's "Grand Theft Auto V" is being used to train self-driving car agents. DeepDrive project allows those with skills to use the open source software for training autonomous vehicle tech.
Google and Tesla are not the only ones interested in the self-driving car industry. However, it is a risky venture considering that millions of dollars are involved through investments and R&D.
Non-profit research company OpenAI has rolled out the new Universe integration which trains self-driving car agents provided that the user has a legitimate copy of "GTA V" that will be used, PC Magazine has learned. The Universe agent will be able to drive around the "Grand Theft Auto V" environment without any input from the player besides from the settings.
OpenAI was established in 2015 with big help from Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk. He has no statement regarding whether the software will be used to train Tesla self-driving cars in the near future.
DeepDrive project and OpenAI's collaboration has cut down the setup time for testing from one whole day to just a mere 20 minutes. It will help save more time in the long run due to the accumulation of the saved hours in a day.
Those interested can get the source code and AMI for "Grand Theft Auto V" plus the pre-trained self-driving car agent using Caffe and TensorFlow, Tech Crunch reported. Due to the consistency in the "GTA V" environment, the errors would be minimized although they need to be trained again in real-life situations.
"Grand Theft Auto V" players know that the people inside the game can be quite violent. The Universe integration fixes that and puts the pedestrians in a non-violent mode as not to distract the agent during its training.
OpenAI and DeepDrive project's self-driving car agent is able to drive even with the different weather conditions in "GTA V." It also reacts to traffic situations in game which changes from time to time.
Watch "GTA V" gameplay below: