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Musk’s OpenAI will train artificial intelligence through video game ‘Universe’
Elon Musk’s OpenAI will introduce Universe, a virtual training ground aimed at teaching AI to play video games, use apps and even interact with websites. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company backed by the Tesla founder and billionaire entrepreneur, defines Universe in a blog post as “a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games, websites and other applications.”
Put simply, Universe will provide a gym that allows AI agents to go beyond their specialized knowledge of an individual environment to something approaching common sense. “Any task a human can complete with a computer.” Using a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) remote desktop, it allows the AI to control the game or app using a virtual keyboard and mouse, and to see its output by analyzing the pixels displayed on the screen. It’s essentially an interface to the company’s Gym toolkit for developing reinforcement algorithms, a type of machine learning system.
“Our goal is to develop a single AI agent that can flexibly apply its past experience on Universe environments to quickly master unfamiliar, difficult environments, which would be a major step towards general intelligence,” OpenAI says. As an example, it points to success of Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo initiative, which defeated the world champion human Go player earlier this year. While that success was impressive, when faced with a different challenge, the agent would have to go back to square one and learn the new environment through millions of trial and error steps.
OpenAI hopes to expand the Reward Learning (RL) lessons learned in one environment so that an AI agent can build upon past experience to succeed in unfamiliar environments.
We're releasing Universe, a platform for measuring and training AI agents: https://t.co/bx7OjMDaJK
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 5, 2016
OpenAI says in its blog post, “Systems with general problem solving ability — something akin to human common sense, allowing an agent to rapidly solve a new hard task — remain out of reach. One apparent challenge is that our agents don’t carry their experience along with them to new tasks. In a standard training regime, we initialize agents from scratch and let them twitch randomly through tens of millions of trials as they learn to repeat actions that happen to lead to rewarding outcomes. If we are to make progress towards generally intelligent agents, we must allow them to experience a wide repertoire of tasks so they can develop world knowledge and problem solving strategies that can be efficiently reused in a new task.”
Prior to Universe, the largest RL resource consisted of 55 Atari games — the Atari Learning Environment, says The Register. But Universe will begin with the largest library of games and resources ever assembled. “Out of the box, Universe comprises thousands of games (e.g. Flash games, slither.io, Starcraft), browser-based tasks (e.g. form filling), and applications (e.g. fold.it),” the OpenAI blog claims. Gaming companies that are cooperating with OpenAI include Flash, Microsoft – OpenAI announced a strategic partnership with the Redmond-based software giant – EA, Valve, Nvidia, Zachtronics, Wolfram, and others.
Universe is about more than gaming. It’s main focus is on training AI agents to complete common online tasks with speed and accuracy. “Today, our agents are mostly learning to interact with common user interface elements like buttons, lists and sliders, but in the future they could complete complex tasks, such as looking up things they don’t know on the internet, managing your email or calendar, completing Khan Academy lessons, or working on Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower tasks.”
The OpenAI blog post introducing Universe gives a long and detailed accounting of how Universe was created and what it hopes to accomplish. At the end, it provides a number of ways that companies and individuals can contribute to the process. It’s fascinating reading for anyone interested in what the future of computing is likely to be.
There is also a darker side to artificial intelligence, which Elon Musk refers to as “summoning the Devil.” As The Register suggests, “While making software smarter may appeal to researchers, society as a whole appears to be increasingly unnerved by the prospect. Beyond the speculative fears about malevolent AI and more realistic concerns about the automation of military weaponry, companies and individuals already have trouble dealing with automated forms of interaction.”
One area of concern is that AI agents may one day be able to reactivate themselves after being shut down by human controllers. What was once the stuff of science fiction such as Minority Report and I, Robot could one day become all too real.
OpenAI Universe has been open-sourced on Github for those that may be interested in testing their own video game bot. We’ve included a video below showing OpenAI in action.
Tesla Robotaxi ride-hailing without a Safety Monitor is proving to be a difficult task, according to some riders who made the journey to Austin to attempt to ride in one of its vehicles that has zero supervision.
Last week, Tesla officially removed Safety Monitors from some — not all — of its Robotaxi vehicles in Austin, Texas, answering skeptics who said the vehicles still needed supervision to operate safely and efficiently.
BREAKING: Tesla launches public Robotaxi rides in Austin with no Safety Monitor
Tesla aimed to remove Safety Monitors before the end of 2025, and it did, but only to company employees. It made the move last week to open the rides to the public, just a couple of weeks late to its original goal, but the accomplishment was impressive, nonetheless.
However, the small number of Robotaxis that are operating without Safety Monitors has proven difficult to hail for a ride. David Moss, who has gained notoriety recently as the person who has traveled over 10,000 miles in his Tesla on Full Self-Driving v14 without any interventions, made it to Austin last week.
He has tried to get a ride in a Safety Monitor-less Robotaxi for the better part of four days, and after 38 attempts, he still has yet to grab one:
Wow just wow!
It’s 8:30PM, 29° out ice storm hailing & Tesla Robotaxi service has turned back on!
Waymo is offline & vast majority of humans are home in the storm
Ride 38 was still supervised but by far most impressive yet pic.twitter.com/1aUnJkcYm8
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) January 25, 2026
Tesla said last week that it was rolling out a controlled test of the Safety Monitor-less Robotaxis. Ashok Elluswamy, who heads the AI program at Tesla, confirmed that the company was “starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader Robotaxi fleet with Safety Monitors,” and that “the ratio will increase over time.”
This is a good strategy that prioritizes safety and keeps the company’s controlled rollout at the forefront of the Robotaxi rollout.
However, it will be interesting to see how quickly the company can scale these completely monitor-less rides. It has proven to be extremely difficult to get one, but that is understandable considering only a handful of the cars in the entire Austin fleet are operating with no supervision within the vehicle.
Tesla has given its biggest hint that Full Self-Driving in Europe is imminent, as a new feature seems to show that the company is preparing for frequent border crossings.
Tesla owner and influencer BLKMDL3, also known as Zack, recently took his Tesla to the border of California and Mexico at Tijuana, and at the international crossing, Full Self-Driving showed an interesting message: “Upcoming country border — FSD (Supervised) will become unavailable.”
FSD now shows a new message when approaching an international border crossing.
Stayed engaged the whole way as we crossed the border and worked great in Mexico! pic.twitter.com/bDzyLnyq0g
— Zack (@BLKMDL3) January 26, 2026
Due to regulatory approvals, once a Tesla operating on Full Self-Driving enters a new country, it is required to comply with the laws and regulations that are applicable to that territory. Even if legal, it seems Tesla will shut off FSD temporarily, confirming it is in a location where operation is approved.
This is something that will be extremely important in Europe, as crossing borders there is like crossing states in the U.S.; it’s pretty frequent compared to life in America, Canada, and Mexico.
Tesla has been working to get FSD approved in Europe for several years, and it has been getting close to being able to offer it to owners on the continent. However, it is still working through a lot of the red tape that is necessary for European regulators to approve use of the system on their continent.
This feature seems to be one that would be extremely useful in Europe, considering the fact that crossing borders into other countries is much more frequent than here in the U.S., and would cater to an area where approvals would differ.
Tesla has been testing FSD in Spain, France, England, and other European countries, and plans to continue expanding this effort. European owners have been fighting for a very long time to utilize the functionality, but the red tape has been the biggest bottleneck in the process.
Tesla Europe builds momentum with expanding FSD demos and regional launches
Tesla operates Full Self-Driving in the United States, China, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship V3 gets launch date update from Elon Musk
The first flight of Starship Version 3 and its new Raptor V3 engines could happen as early as March.
Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX’s next Starship launch, Flight 12, is expected in about six weeks. This suggests that the first flight of Starship Version 3 and its new Raptor V3 engines could happen as early as March.
In a post on X, Elon Musk stated that the next Starship launch is in six weeks. He accompanied his announcement with a photo that seemed to have been taken when Starship’s upper stage was just about to separate from the Super Heavy Booster. Musk did not state whether SpaceX will attempt to catch the Super Heavy Booster during the upcoming flight.
The upcoming flight will mark the debut of Starship V3. The upgraded design includes the new Raptor V3 engine, which is expected to have nearly twice the thrust of the original Raptor 1, at a fraction of the cost and with significantly reduced weight. The Starship V3 platform is also expected to be optimized for manufacturability.
The Starship V3 Flight 12 launch timeline comes as SpaceX pursues an aggressive development cadence for the fully reusable launch system. Previous iterations of Starship have racked up a mixed but notable string of test flights, including multiple integrated flight tests in 2025.
Interestingly enough, SpaceX has teased an aggressive timeframe for Starship V3’s first flight. Way back in late November, SpaceX noted on X that it will be aiming to launch Starship V3’s maiden flight in the first quarter of 2026. This was despite setbacks like a structural anomaly on the first V3 booster during ground testing.
“Starship’s twelfth flight test remains targeted for the first quarter of 2026,” the company wrote in its post on X.
Tesla Robotaxi ride-hailing without a Safety Monitor proves to be difficult
Tesla gives its biggest hint that Full Self-Driving in Europe is imminent
