OpenAI: $1 Billion to Create Artificial Intelligence Without Profit Motive by Who is Who in the Silicon Valley
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
3.4.12 OpenAI: $1 Billion to Create Artificial Intelligence Without Profit Motive by Who is Who in the Silicon Valley, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 3: AI in Medicine
Silicon Valley Kingpins Commit $1 Billion to Create Artificial Intelligence Without Profit Motive
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Elon Musk, head of electric (and increasingly autonomous) car maker Tesla, launched a non-profit artificial intelligence research firm on Dec. 11 with other Silicon Valley giants including Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman,
The fledgling company has already attracted a handful of AI researchers. Ilya Sutskever left Google’s deep learning group to be the research director of OpenAI.
“I wish Ilya well in his new endeavor,” said Geoff Hinton, a leading AI researcher who works at Google. He declined to comment further, as did a Google spokesman.
A group of deep-pocketed Silicon Valley investors committed $1 billion to ensure that artificial intelligence serves societal needs rather than commercial interests.
The commitment announced on Friday will fund a non-profit research firm called OpenAI Inc., where researchers will be unencumbered by the pressures of for-profit companies and grant-writing duties of academia.
On its website, the group suggested that companies dedicated to pleasing shareholders should not be allowed to control the future of AI. “Our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders,” the group said.
The announcement follows a string of moves on the part of commercial companies to make AI technology available on a noncommercial basis. Facebook Inc.FB +0.37%, Google, and International Business Machines Corp.IBM -0.21% recently donated portions of their formerly proprietary AI software through an open source license, which allows the technology to be freely used, shared, and modified.
At the same time, several funders of OpenAI have business interests in developing artificial intelligence. How OpenAI’s efforts would dovetail with their commercial priorities is not clear.
The group’s backers include A-list entrepreneurs including Tesla Motors Inc.TSLA +0.38% CEO Elon Musk, Y Combinator President Sam Altman, LinkedIn Corp.LNKD +0.03% co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Jessica Livingston, a Y Combinator partner.
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