This work offers the first demonstration of a general purpose learning agent that can be trained end-to-end to handle a wide variety of challenging tasks, taking in only raw pixels as inputs and transforming these into actions that can be executed in real-time. This kind of technology should help us build more useful products—imagine if you could ask the Google app to complete any kind of complex task (“Okay Google, plan me a great backpacking trip through Europe!”).
We also hope this kind of domain general learning algorithm will give researchers new ways to make sense of complex large-scale data creating the potential for exciting discoveries in fields such as climate science, physics, medicine and genomics. And it may even help scientists better understand the process by which humans learn. After all, as the great physicist Richard Feynman famously said: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”