Elon Musk, Amazon, Others Commit $1 Billion To AI Research Company

Some of the prominent names in the tech sector have come together for a new non-profit artificial intelligence research company, OpenAI. The company is being sponsored by Elon Musk, Infosys, Amazon Web Services and Y Research, among others and has received $1billion, although it expects to spend only a “tiny” fraction of that in the next few years.

OpenAI aims 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.

“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 possible” –OpenAI

OpenAI's co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk; research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning and CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe. Other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka are advisors to the group.

“We really have this focus on trying to work toward the next set of breakthroughs,” said Brockman. “It is important for us, as a lab, to be focused on the results that will unlock future research.”

The company said that it will collaborate with many institutions and companies to research and deploy new technologies. It wants to “build value for everyone rather than shareholders”.