Open AI makes efforts to increase transparency

Some prominent tech giants have poured in $1billion in a non-profit called Open AI. The backers of the new company include Tesla head Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the start-up incubator Y-Combinator and Amazon Web Services.

In a recent blog post announcing about the news, the team behind the Open AI project said that Artificial Intelligence research firm’s goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as whole.

The new company will disclose its patent and research before public in a bid to increase transparency about AI’s potential rather than focusing on its commercial implications.

According to its backers, the new research is free of any financial obligations, and focuses on a positive human impact, said the group that back the company.

“We believe AI should be extension of human wills and, in spirit of liberty. It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly”, the group said in a statement.

SpaceX head Elon Musk since long has been a critic of the commercialization of artificial intelligence. AI is the biggest existential threat, said Musk in a 2014 interview with Massachusetts Institute of Technology students.

Musk was also an early investor in the artificial intelligence company DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in March. He also joined Mark Zuckerberg and several other prominent tech figures in investing in the machine learning firm Vicarious in 2014.