FOR a long time, technology king Elon Musk has been outspoken about the dangers of creating human-level artificial intelligence.
Fearing we could one day be the target of a Terminator-esque apocalypse, the Tesla boss has teamed up with other prominent tech executives to offer a solution.
The answer comes in the form of a new non-profit venture known as OpenAI, which has raised $1.3 billion to ensure artificial intelligence is being created to supplement human capabilities, rather than making us obsolete.
Musk will act as co-chair of the non-profit with venture capitalist Sam Altman, who backed Reddit. The project has attracted other influential donors including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston.
But what exactly will the organisation do with all that money?
“Our goal is 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,” OpenAI revealed in a blog post.
Understanding the development of human-level AI is inevitable; the organisation is hoping to “prioritise a good outcome for all over its own self-interest”.
To achieve this, OpenAI has vowed to share all its research publicly to counteract large corporations and governments exploiting the ever-evolving technology.
“Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world,” OpenAI’s blog explains.
“We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.”
When asked if the open-door approach to sharing research will only make it easier to exploit the technology, the co-founders said it was a highly debated topic of discussion.
“I think the best defence against the misuse of AI 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,” Elon Musk told Backchannel.
“We think it’s far more likely that many, many AIs will work to stop the occasional bad actors than the idea that there is a single AI a billion times more powerful than anything else,” added Mr Altman.