OpenAI
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| Founded | December 11, 2015 |
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| Founders | Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others |
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| Products | OpenAI Gym |
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Key people
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Ilya Sutskever, Ian Goodfellow, Greg Brockman |
| Endowment | $1 billion pledged (2015) |
| Mission | Friendly artificial intelligence |
| Website | www |
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, associated with business magnate Elon Musk, that aims to carefully promote and develop friendly AI in such a way as to benefit, rather than harm, humanity as a whole. The organization aims to "freely collaborate" with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. The company is supported by over US$1 billion in commitments; however, only a tiny fraction of the $1 billion pledged is expected to be spent in the first few years. The founders are motivated in part by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence.
Some scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell, believe that if advanced AI someday gains the ability to re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate, an unstoppable "intelligence explosion" could lead to human extinction. Elon Musk characterizes AI as humanity's biggest existential threat. OpenAI's founders structured it as a non-profit free of financial stockholder obligations, so that they could focus its research on creating a positive long-term human impact.
OpenAI states that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society," and that it's equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly". Research on safety cannot safely be postponed: "because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach." OpenAI states that AI "should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible..." Co-chair Sam Altman expects the decades-long project to surpass human intelligence.
Vishal Sikka, the CEO of Infosys, stated that an "openness" where the endeavor would "produce results generally in the greater interest of humanity" was a fundamental requirement for his support, and that OpenAI "aligns very nicely with our long-held values" and their "endeavor to do purposeful work". Cade Metz of Wired suggests that corporations such as Amazon may be motivated by a desire to use open-source software and data to level the playing field against corporations like Google and Facebook that own enormous supplies of proprietary data. Altman states that Y Combinator companies will share their data with OpenAI.
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Wikipedia