Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will lead a new company called OpenAI, a “non-profit artificial intelligence research company”, designed to protect humanity from adverse affects of artificial intelligence.
The company is backed by high profile technology entrepreneurs and scientists.
Musk has previously warned about the way AI is being developed. He previously committed $10 million to the Future of Life Institute to work against the development of AI weapons.
The non-profit will be led by Musk, along with Sam Altman, the founder of startup incubator Y Combinator, according to Quartz.
Other backers include Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn; Jessica Livingston, another Y Combinator founder; and Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal with Musk.
The group, along with Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and Y Combinator, have pledged $1 billion for artificial intelligence research that keeps humanity at its core.
Altman told Quartz that he and others in the group had been brainstorming the idea for a while.
“Over the last couple of months, it really started to come together,” he said. “We were able to recruit what I think its one of the best collections of researchers in the world: We’ll get started and see how it goes.”
Originally published by Cosmos as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs unite to defeat killer robots
Bill Condie
Bill Condie is a science journalist based in Adelaide, Australia.
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