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.
The idea behind the non-profit is to bring artificial intelligence to our everyday lives, rather than keeping it locked up in robotics labs around the world.
“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.
Building a viable chore-bot is just one of Open AI’s goals, another is to build a robot with a useful and natural understanding of language.
Basically, they say the robots of today can understand certain, very specific questions and commands, but real intelligence is being able to ask for clarification and figure out if what’s being asked of it practical, safe, and non-ambiguous.
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.
One of OpenAI’s goals is to build a chatbot agent that can go beyond simple tasks like looking up movie times or doing simple translation tasks, and up to holding a conversation or truly understanding a document or even the ability to ask clarifying questions if it doesn’t understand something.
