Products OpenAI Gym Founded 11 December 2015 | Website www.openai.com Founders Elon Musk, Sam Altman | |
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Location San Francisco, California, USA Key people Ilya Sutskever, Ian Goodfellow, Greg Brockman Endowment $1 billion pledged (2015) Mission Friendly artificial intelligence | ||
Openai non profit ai company by elon musk and sam altman
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.
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Motives
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.
Strategy
Musk poses the question: "what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good? We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing AI in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity." Musk acknowledges that "there is always some risk that in actually trying to advance (friendly) AI we may create the thing we are concerned about"; nonetheless, the best defense is "to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there's not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower."
Musk and Altman's counter-intuitive strategy of trying to reduce the risk that AI will cause overall harm, by giving AI to everyone, is controversial within the community of people like Musk who are concerned with existential risk from artificial intelligence. Philosopher Nick Bostrom is skeptical of Musk's approach: "If you have a button that could do bad things to the world, you don't want to give it to everyone." During a 2016 conversation about the technological singularity, Altman said that "we don’t plan to release all of our source code" and mentioned a plan to "allow wide swaths of the world to elect representatives to a new governance board". Greg Brockman stated that "Our goal right now... is to do the best thing there is to do. It’s a little vague."
OpenAI Gym
On April 27, 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym", a platform for reinforcement learning research that aims to provide an easy-to-setup general-intelligence benchmark with a wide variety of different environments (somewhat akin to, but broader than, the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge used in supervised learning research), and that hopes to standardize the way in which environments are defined in AI research publications, so that published research becomes more easily reproducible.
Universe
On December 5, 2016, OpenAI released Universe, a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across the world's supply of games, websites and other applications.
Participants
The two co-chairs of the project are:
Other backers of the project include:
High-profile staff include:
The group started in early January 2016 with nine researchers. According to Wired, Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, one of the "founding fathers" of the deep learning movement, and drew up a list of the "best researchers in the field". Microsoft's Peter Lee has stated that the cost of a top AI researcher exceeds the cost of a top NFL quarterback prospect. While OpenAI pays corporate-level (rather than nonprofit-level) salaries, it doesn't currently pay AI researchers the same salaries as those same researchers can make at Facebook or Google. Nevertheless, Sutskever stated that he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly of because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." Brockman stated that "the best thing that I could imagine doing was moving humanity closer to building real AI in a safe way." OpenAI researcher Wojciech Zaremba stated that he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times his market value to join OpenAI instead.