Artificial Intelligence Nonprofit OpenAI Launches With Backing From Elon Musk And Sam Altman

Drew Olanoff | Tech Crunch | December 11, 2015

Today, OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company was announced to the world. Its director, Ilya Sutskever, is a research scientist at Google. This comes a day after Facebook open-sourced its AI hardware. Its reason for existing was explained in an introductory post:

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.
Former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman is taking the same position for OpenAI. There are quite a few other interesting names involved, including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and Tesla/SpaceX’s Elon Musk acting as co-chairs:

The group’s 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. OpenAI’s co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk...