Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services co-finance AI research

PanARMENIAN.Net - Several technology luminaries are announced Friday, December 11, that they have committed $1 billion to fund a new nonprofit artificial intelligence research company called OpenAI, VentureBeat reports.

Y Combinator president Sam Altman, former Stripe chief technology officer Greg Brockman, Tesla and SpaceX cofounder Elon Musk, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Y Combinator founding partner Jessica Livingston, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services, consulting company Infosys, and the recently launched YC Research lab are putting up the financial backing, according to a blog post.

“Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely,” the OpenAI team wrote in the blog post.

The launch is coming in the middle of a debate on the potential positive and negative impacts of artificial intelligence in society. Musk, Altman, Bill Gates, and other technology figureheads have weighed in on the subject as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and other companies build up their AI technologies and talent pools.

Google research scientist Ilya Sutskever will be OpenAI’s research director. Brockman will serve as its chief technology officer. Stanford Ph.D. student and two-time former Google intern Andrej Karpathy is on board. AI luminary Yoshua Bengio is an advisor in the effort.