OpenAI made a system that’s better at Montezuma’s Revenge than humans

Artificial intelligence (AI) can generate synthetic scans of brain cancer, simultaneously translate between languages, and teach robots to manipulate objects with humanlike dexterity. And as new research from OpenAI reveals, it’s pretty darn good at playing video games, too.

On Tuesday, OpenAI — a nonprofit, San Francisco-based AI research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, among other tech luminaries — detailed in a research paper AI that can best humans at the retro platformer Montezuma’s Revenge. The top-performing iteration found 22 of the 24 rooms in the first level, and occasionally discovered all 24.