OpenAI, a new non-profit artificial intelligence research company, has set a course to guide the development of artificial intelligence technology “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
In a blog posting, the OpenAI team said it is “hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly.”
The endeavor is backed by $1 billion in funding commitments from prominent Silicon Valley figures, including Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, amongst other. Corporate backers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research.
OpenAI’s research will be led by Ilya Sutskever, previously a leading researcher at Google and one of the world experts in machine learning. The technology team includes Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe.
