Elon Musk's US$1 billion company wants to build a housework robot
Robot is a good way to test machine's ability to learn common tasks, according to non-profit US company's leadership
Elon Musk has built cars and rockets. Next up: domestic robots.
OpenAI — the artificial-intelligence research non-profit, San Francisco-based company co-chaired by Tesla Motors CEO Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman — wants to build a robot for your home.
Building a robot, OpenAI's leadership explains in a blog entry on Monday, is a good way to test and refine a machine's ability to learn how to perform common tasks. By "build," the company means taking a current off-the-shelf robot and customising it to do housework.
"More generally, robotics is a good test bed for many challenges in AI," reads the blog entry.
The mission of OpenAI is to research AI and other machine-learning technologies with an eye toward making sure that the robots don't one day go rogue and destroy humanity.
When OpenAI launched in December 2015, it secured US$1 billion in funding from a who's who in tech, including Altman and Musk as well as Silicon Valley luminaries like Jessica Livingston and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel.
Apart from robotics, OpenAI says that its other big ambitions are around chatbots, or "intelligent agents" that can talk to you in plain natural speech. You know, kind of like on Facebook Messenger.