Silicon Valley pioneers back open Artificial Intelligence hub in $1bn push
Leading Silicon Valley pioneers have pledged in excess of $1bn into a recently unveiled open Artificial Intelligence foundation geared towards promoting research in the area on a not-for-profit basis, as leading minds in the sector aim to make significant advances towards the next generation of computing.
Dubbed OpenAI, the new company will conduct (and freely publish) research in the area of machine learning, with some of the leading Silicon Valley pioneers - both in terms of entrepreneurs, financial backers, as well as computer scientists - involved, according to a blog post penned by Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's CTO, and research director respectively.
Among the financial backers of OpenAI are Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk (a trio of online payment entrepreneurs collectively known as 'The PayPal Mafia'), among other notable private individuals, as well as support from Amazon's cloud-computing arm Amazon Web Services plus enterprise software outfit Infosys.
OpenAI aims to advance knowledge in the sector free from financial pressure from shareholders, with the overall goal of advancing digital intelligence in order to "better focus on a positive human impact", according to Brockman and Sutskever's post.
The outfit's research team will aim to research algorithms in the field of AI with particular reference how computers can "dream", "be creative", and "experience the world", then make the findings freely avaialble to the rest of the industry.
"We're hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders," according to the post penned by the pair.
"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. We'll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies."
Marketers are increasingly looking towards AI, or "machine learning", to better hone their advertising efforts, no more so than in the space of programmatic advertising which uses large pools of data (a.k.a. customer insights) to better optmise their online media buys in order to improve conversion rates, as well as bolster its chances of finding 'lookalike customers' online.
A recent Forrester study found that 16 per cent of US jobs will be lost in the U.S. over the next decade as the result of the rise of artificial intelligence and technology, although it also believes that 13.6 million jobs will be created during that time due to the trend.
The research outfit has claimed that while there will be large scale job losses as robots and cognitive computing continues to develop, 9 per cent of US workforce will find new jobs as a result of this progress, meaning net job losses of 7 per cent overall.