Elon Musk, chief executive of electric carmaker Tesla Motors, on Friday unveiled OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that is backed by other prominent names from the technology world.
‘Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,’ a blog post on OpenAI’s website said.
The non-profit will be co-chaired by Musk and technology venture capitalist Sam Altman, who has backed Reddit.
Musk told Backchannel ‘As you know, I’ve had some concerns about AI for some time.’
He also revealed he wants to use AI to make us ‘superhuman’
‘If you think about how you use, say, applications on the internet, you’ve got your email and you’ve got the social media and with apps on your phone — they effectively make you superhuman and you don’t think of them as being other, you think of them as being an extension of yourself.
‘So to the degree that we can guide AI in that direction, we want to do that.’
OpenAI’s list of donors include PayPal Holding Inc co-founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn Corp co-founder Reid Hoffman and Musk himself among others.
As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders.
‘Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. ‘
‘We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.’
They have committed $1 billion for the fledgling firm, but OpenAI said it expects to spend a ‘tiny fraction’ of that amount in the next few years.
Jasper and Sardine 
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