CALIFORNIA: Some of the most prominent executives in the technology industry including the Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk are backing a non-profit artificial intelligence research company with funding of USD one billion.

The effort announced on February 19, known as OpenAI, joins a number of other initiatives by prominent companies like Google, Apple and IBM to tap advanced computer technology to solve problems such as recognising faces or translating languages.

“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,” a blog post on OpenAI’s website said.

Predicting that human-level artificial intelligence would eventually arrive, the backers argued that it was vital to have a research institution like OpenAI in place to seek ‘a good outcome for all over its own self-interest’.

Musk has been critical of the possible harm from artificial intelligence, telling Massachusetts Institute of Technology students that “if I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that”. He will be co-chair of the non-profit with technology venture capitalist Sam Altman, who has backed Reddit.

OpenAI’s list of donors include PayPal Holding Inc co-founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn Corp co-founder Reid Hoffman and Musk himself. The venture’s research director is Ilya Sutskever, a former research scientist at Google, and its chief technology officer is Greg Brockman. OpenAI said it expects to spend a ‘tiny fraction’ of the USD one billion in the next few years. Other backers include Amazon.com Inc’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services, Indian IT giant Infosys and Brockman, former chief technology officer of payments startup Stripe. —