Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have launched OpenAI, a non-profit company that will research new artificial intelligence systems and share its findings, Bloomberg reported, adding that at least USD 1 billion has been invested in the organisation, according to Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and Space Exploration. He will be OpenAI's co-chairman, along with Sam Altman, president of the Y Combinator.
OpenAI has received financial backing from Musk, Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, Reid Hoffman and others as well as companies including Amazon Web Services and Infosys.
“The goal of OpenAI is really somewhat straightforward, it’s what set of actions can we take that increase the probability of the future being better,” Musk said. “We certainly don’t want to have any negative surprises on this front.”
OpenAI’s chief technology officer is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe, a startup valued in excess of USD 1 billion. Its research director will be AI researcher Ilya Sutskever, formerly with Google. At Google, Sutskever’s work included research into the technology that became Smart Reply, the auto e-mail-writing feature, as well as systems that can learn to write their own algorithms. The organization has attracted other researchers, whose past work ranges from developing robots that can learn to perform tasks based on human demonstrations, to software that can improve its own code to solve new problems.
The idea, is that “real breakthroughs in research are serendipitous,” Brockman said, so the best way to develop powerful artificial intelligence systems is to take a group of accomplished people and give them the latitude to focus on solving novel problems.
Pieter Abbeel, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, will be one adviser to the company. Other advisers will include Yoshua Bengio, one of the founding figures of the Deep Leaning form of artificial intelligence, and Alan Kay, a computer scientist from the US.
Wojciech Zaremba, one of OpenAI’s researchers, said the group’s openness can help serve as a balance to the narrower interests of researchers at commercial ventures.
