With $10M invested, Space Engineers dev launches its own AI firm

Keen Software House chief Marek Rosa has publicly announced that the studio has spun its articial intelligence research division off into a sister company, GoodAI, after investing more than $10 million to design general-purpose artificial brains.

It's interesting to see a game developer expanding its AI R&D efforts in this fashion, and GoodAI is especially intriguing because the nascent company has already released a Brain Simulator prototype (under an open-source license) that you can use to tinker with its tech and design your own (limited) AI agents.

In the future, Rosa hopes to allow people to import AI brains built in Brain Simulator into Keen games like Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers to make the games better and help other players test and refine AI designs.

"One of my life-long dreams has always been to create a human-level artificial intelligence. After the success of Space Engineers, I was finally in a position to go full-throttle on this," writes Rosa. "In 1/2014 we started a new team dedicated solely for this purpose. Today, the AI team has 15 computer scientists and engineersand our plan is to grow to at least 30 people. We are also considering opening offices across Europe (to reach the talent who can’t move to Prague.)"

Rosa will serve as the chief executive of both Keen Software House and GoodAI going forward; the AI researchers have already achieved two of their milestones (creating the Brain Simulator visual AI editor and then designing an AI that can play Pong) and Rosa intends to launch a Brain Simulator platform that people can use to collaborate and share ideas in the next 3-12 months.