Big-named tech executives are now pledging US$1 billion to make Artificial Intelligence beneficial to humanity as a whole and without being constrained by the needs to reap financial profits in return.
The OpenAI venture is being supported even by Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, Indian multinational giant Infosys and Amazon Web services. Tesla Motors and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk and Y Combinator Chief Executive Sam Altman are the co-chairs of OpenAI.
Over its course, Open AI has attracted a number of high-profile AI researchers as well. Google research scientist Ilya Sutskever has been appointed as its research director, and Google's Doctoral Fellow in Deep Learning Durk Kingma, and former Stripe CTO Grek Brokman are also part of OpenAI.
Google has also expressed its concerns over the possible results with the development of the industry, which is why it also happened to create its own "AI ethics committee." Mountain View will also attend a conference in the near future to discuss the ethical implications that come in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
According to OpenAI, Artificial Intelligence systems today are impressive, but they still have narrow capabilities. However, the team noted that the field has been surprising as of late and that we have started to see computers to be capable of dreaming and experiencing the real world, as well as being creative.
Since OpenAI's research isn't constrained from financial obligations, the venture will be able to better focus on delivering a positive human impact. According to the company, AI should be an extension of individual human wills and should be evenly distributed as possible.
Many scientists have already warned that the progressions in Artificial Intelligence could ultimately lead to threaten humanity. Elon Musk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told his students that Artificial Intelligence is the "biggest existential threat" to humanity. Stephen Hawking also expresses the same idea, speaking to BBC that AI could potentially, in an increasing rate, re-design itself.
However, there are other experts claiming that the risks of Artificial Intelligence posing actual threat to humans still remains remote.
People first began to think that solving certain tasks such as chess would lead to the discovery of human-level intelligence algorithms. However, the answers to each task had turned out to be much less general than what was hopes.
