American billionaire Elon Musk, founder of leading IT companies Tesla Motors and SpaceX, announced the creation of a nonprofit organization (NPO) dedicated to developing fully-fledged artificial intelligence. Several companies, including those owned by Musk, will participate in funding the NPO. The total allocated funds amount to $1 billion.
The organization, called OpenAI, will be funded not only by Musk himself but also by other prominent figures from Silicon Valley, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others. According to Elon Musk, the project plans to spend at least a billion dollars, but a small fraction of that amount will be sufficient for the initial phase. The founders' actual investment remains unknown.
"Because our research is free from financial obligations, we can focus on making a positive impact on humanity," OpenAI said in a statement.
As stated on the organization's website, it strives "to put artificial intelligence at the service of all humanity as a whole, without the need to generate profit."
“It is difficult to understand how human-level artificial intelligence could benefit society, and it is equally difficult to imagine how much harm it could cause to society if it is not designed or used correctly.” — OpenAI notes.
The new company's chief research officer will be Ilya Sutskever, who previously worked at Google Brain, the search engine's deep learning project. Sutskever is a machine learning specialist. Wired calls him a protégé of Geoffrey Hinton, a legend in neural networks.
In November, the management of the Japanese automaker Toyota announced its intention to invest a billion dollars in artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, scientists and engineers from various countries, including Elon Musk, signed an open letter in July calling for curbing the arms race in the creation of killer robots.
Last year, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking stated that artificial intelligence could outpace humans in self-reproduction and induced evolution.
OpenAI also announced that all research results conducted under its auspices will be publicly available. They will be disseminated through NGO publications and open patents.
As a reminder, a team of specialists from Tufts University (USA) has developed an artificial intelligence system that allows the latter to refuse orders from an operator, given sufficient grounds. The innovation was recently presented at the AI-HRI technology conference and has already sparked heated debate over the ethicality of the invention.
