Rockets, electric cars, inhabiting Mars. Those are some of the well-known goals and accomplishments of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Now, add Rosie to the mix.
You do remember Rosie the robot maid from “The Jetsons,” right? OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company backed by Musk, has announced that one of its goals is to “enable” a household robot.
The robot would be off the shelf and not built by OpenAI, but the goal is to help it perform basic housework, enabled by the technology the company is working on.
“More generally, robotics is a good testbed for many challenges in AI,” said a blog post recently on OpenAI’s website.
Musk, who has voiced concerns about the possible perils of AI — he once said it could be more dangerous than nukes — wants to make sure he has a say in how it develops. Early last year, he donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute.
In December, he and other tech bigwigs unveiled the non-profit OpenAI. The startup is headed by former Google research scientist Ilya Sutskever with CTO Greg Brockman, and backed by Musk, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. Also contributing toward the $1 billion effort: Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research, according to OpenAI’s website.
Among OpenAI’s other goals, according to the blog post: Build an agent with natural language understanding, and solve “a wide variety of games” using that agent. It gave a shout out to Google’s efforts in this area, which includes high-profile Go matches between a machine and a human earlier this year: “We are inspired by the pioneering work of DeepMind, who have produced impressive results in this area in the past few years.”
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