Silicon Valley investors to bankroll artificial-intelligence center

The announcement comes as Cambridge University announces its own £10 million research centre, funded with a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, to explore the opportunities and challenges that will face humanity as artificial intelligence technology improves. “We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies”. One of its main goals is to prioritize good outcomes by the time by human-level AI emerges.

Big-named tech executives are now pledging US$1 billion to make Artificial Intelligence beneficial to humanity as a whole and without being constrained by the needs to reap financial profits in return.

The group intends to become the governing body of artificial intelligence, overseen by research scientists and developers who have the expertise to determine the possibilities and potential dangers of machine intelligence initiatives. In their introductory blog post, OpenAI also describes themselves as an “extension of individual human wills” and “in the spirit of liberty”, perhaps suggesting that the organisation has politically libertarian values.

To achieve this, OpenAI has vowed to share all its research publicly to counteract large corporations and governments exploiting the ever-evolving technology.

The project has attracted other influential donors including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston.

OpenAI’s co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk; research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning and CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe.

The company, being free from financial obligations, can better focus on research that has a positive human impact.

Despite Tesla’s first auto being a pricey electric sports vehicle, Musk said “our long term plan is to build a wide range of models, including affordably priced family cars”.

“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”, OpenAI’s blog explains.

Musk said “the strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model”.