Elon Musk Shows He's Serious About Keeping AI Safe

 Artificial Intelligence  

After creating a stir lately about the risks of artificial intelligence, Elon Musk has firmly put his money where his mouth is with a $10 million dollar donation to the Future of Life Institute to support Friendly AI research.

Elon Musk, creator of Tesla and SpaceX, has decided to commit a $10M donation to the Future of Life Institute to run a global research program aimed at keeping AI beneficial to humanity.

There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase.

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Musk's announcement was welcomed by AI leaders in both academia and industry:

"Here are all these leading AI researchers saying that AI safety is important. I agree with them, so I’m today committing $10M to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity."

"It's wonderful, because this will provide the impetus to jump-start research on AI safety", said AAAI president Tom Dietterich. "This addresses several fundamental questions in AI research that deserve much more funding than even this donation will provide."

“Here are all these leading AI researchers saying that AI safety is important”, said Musk in the statement, referring to this letter originally put forward by FLI founder and MIT professor Max Tegmark. A long list of leading AI-researchers have signed the open letter calling for research aimed at ensuring that AI systems are robust and beneficial, doing what we want them to do. “I agree with them, so I’m today committing $10M to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity,” states Musk.

Funding research on artificial intelligence safety. It's all fun & games until someone loses an I http://t.co/t1aGnrTU21
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2015

"Dramatic advances in artificial intelligence are opening up a range of exciting new applications", said Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, co-founders of DeepMind Technologies, which was recently acquired by Google. "With these newfound powers comes increased responsibility. Elon's generous donation will support researchers as they investigate the safe and ethical use of artificial intelligence, laying foundations that will have far reaching societal impacts as these technologies continue to progress".




SOURCE  Future of Life Institute 

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