An Elon Musk-backed artificial intelligence research group just got a brand new toy from chip maker Nvidia. Nvidia nvda said on Monday that it had donated one of its new supercomputers to the OpenAI non-profit artificial intelligence research project. OpenAI debuted in December with financial backing from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk along with money from other high-profile technology luminaries like LinkedIn lnkd co-founder Reid Hoffman and PayPal pypl co-founder Peter Thiel. OpenAI's goal is partly to create a non-profit outside the corporate sector that could research artificial intelligence technologies without a financial incentive. The concern is that many companies like Google and Facebook that are researching artificial intelligence technologies would horde talent and only work on projects beneficial to their financial interests.

Have we learned nothing from Tay, the Microsoft chatbot that spewed foul racist garbage after only a few hours of interacting with trolls on Twitter? Sure, Reddit models a colloquial tone, as Sophie Kleeman at Gizmodo points out, and its many communities discuss a wide range of subjects, but it is also frequently the boneyard where all grace and decency go to die. Will OpenAI's learning systems absorb strategies for choosing careers and college majors, or only gain expertise in nihilistic lulz and platform-specific acronyms? At least, a success from the researchers on this front would break new ground: They'd have created the only brain ever to get smarter by reading Reddit.

OpenAI's researchers gather around the first AI supercomputer in a box, Nvidia DGX-1. Dubbed an "AI supercomputer-in-a-box", the DGX-1 will be used by the non-profit research team to explore the challenges surrounding artificial intelligence. There are some things that machines are simply better at doing than humans, but humans still have plenty going for them. Here's a look at how the two are going to work in concert to deliver a more powerful future for IT, and the human race. The idea is to find ways OpenAI can use the supercomputer as it works on projects like artificial personal assistants, autonomous cars, and robots for the everyman. Debuted earlier this year, Nvidia describes the DGX-1 system as the first deep learning supercomputer that's built for artificial intelligence.

The DGX-1 is a huge advance," OpenAI Research Scientist Ilya Sutskever said. "It will allow us to explore problems that were completely unexplored before, and it will allow us to achieve levels of performance that weren't achievable." OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company with a goal "to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. "Artificial intelligence has the potential to be the most positive technology that humans ever create," said OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Greg Brockman. "It has the potential to unlock the solutions to problems that have really plagued us for a very long time."

OpenAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence research company, just became the proud owner of the first ever DGX-1 supercomputer. Made by NVIDIA, the rig boasts a whopping 170 teraflops of computing power, equivalent to 250 usual servers -- and OpenAI is gonna use it all to read Reddit comments. OpenAI's researchers gather around the first AI supercomputer in a box, NVIDIA DGX-1. OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company whose purpose is to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." And now, NVIDIA CEO CEO Jen-Hsun Huang just delivered the most powerful tool the company has ever had at its disposal, a US 2 billion supercomputer.

A visualization of a convolutional neural network, which has a color scheme similar to OpenAI's. Since announced in December 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman's OpenAI has recruited some of the foremost names in modern artificial intelligence research. Its poached top talent from giants in the field--research director Ilya Sutskever cut his teeth at Google Brain after studying with A.I. veterans Geoff Hinton and Andrew Ng. In their latest round of hires, the company is starting to diversify its staff. OpenAI's newest recruits come from Google Brain (where they have previously tapped), but also from startups and a trading firm.

Reddit is known for many things: lively communities, a dedicated user base, cum boxes, incest. Now, the Elon Musk-and-Peter Thiel-backed nonprofit OpenAI wants to use Reddit's vast array of content as a guide for its new machine learning programs. MIT Technology Review reports that OpenAI has partnered with NVIDIA to use the latter company's new DGX-1 supercomputer to train its deep learning systems both more rapidly and with more data. One way they're going about that, apparently, is by using Reddit, so cross your fingers that the robots don't start spouting abuse and garbage! "One very easy way of always getting our models to work better is to just scale the amount of compute," OpenAI research scientist Andrej Karpathy said in a press release. "So right now, if we're training on, say, a month of conversations on Reddit, we can, instead, train on entire years of conversations of people talking to each other on all of Reddit."

Learn from OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman on how NVIDIA DGX-1 has the power to create impactful AI technologies and achieve unimaginable breakthroughs.

Remember the horror movie The Fly, in which a brilliant scientist comes up with an groundbreaking technology -- only for his good intentions to head south when he accidentally gets genetically spliced with a housefly, turning him into a hideous monster? That's kind of the vibe we get hearing about a project that aims to teach an AI to hold a polite conversation by feeding it message threads from Reddit. Nonetheless, that's the working theory held by researchers at OpenAI, the nonprofit Artificial Intelligence company backed by Silicon Valley heavy-hitters like Elon Musk, which lists its mission as "to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible." All kidding aside, the impressive-sounding project focuses on creating a deep learning neural network able to build up a "probabilistic understanding" of conversation, and maybe even construct enough of a language model to be able to communicate itself. To help with this, OpenAI is employing a DGX-1 supercomputer developed by Nvidia.