Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other technology entrepreneurs are hoping that talented researchers, if given enough freedom and money, can develop artificial intelligence systems as advanced as those being built by the legions of teams at Alphabet’s Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Along the way, they’d like to nonchalantly save humanity from oblivion.
They have already managed to snag a former top Googler to help with the project which is called OpenAI. Overseen by ex-Googler Ilya Sutskever along with Greg Brockman, the former CTO of high-profile payments startup Stripe, the non-profit OpenAI will have the talent to compete with the industry’s top artificial intelligence outfits, including Google and Facebook, and then share its findings.
Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Motors Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Sam Altman, president of the Y Combinator, will serve as co-chairman. The nonprofit has received financial backing from Musk, Thiel, co-founder of PayPal Holdings Inc. and Palantir Technologies Inc., Reid Hoffman and others as well as companies including Amazon Web Services and Infosys.
Over the past decade the field of artificial intelligence has shifted from being an obscure, dead-end backwater function of computer science to one of the defining technologies of the age. Faster computers, the availability of large data sets, and corporate sponsorship have developed the technology to a point where it powers Google’s web search systems and helps Facebook. understand pictures, giving you suggestions on who to tag.
“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. We certainly don’t want to have any negative surprises on this front.”
– Elon Musk CEO and founder of Tesla.
The total amount of money funding the non-profit has said to be significant with Elon Musk hinting that it around $1 billion.
