When Machine Meets Man, Elon Musk's OpenAI Hopes To Be There
Will Artificial Intelligence became a human threat? Not in the near future but Elon Musk-backed OpenAI is not sitting pretty on the outside chance that it does.
OpenAI, a non-profit research company, is backed by several tech big wigs besides Musk, noted machine learning researchers and even investors like Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel. Its launch was announced on Saturday with a goal to 'advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return'.
Should AI attain human-level intelligence in the distant future, OpenAI posits a need for a research institution that can see the greater good over self-interest.
"AI systems today have impressive but narrow capabilities. It seems that we'll keep whittling away at their constraints, and in the extreme case they will reach human performance on virtually every intellectual task. It's 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," a blog post from the company reads.
Though Musk has a vested interest in matters AI, given Tesla's efforts to build such systems into the automobiles it makes, he has expressed misgivings about its misuse, PC World reports while referring to a letter he signed last year that called for a ban on autonomous weapons.
