Technology billionaire Elon Musk has quit the board of the research group he co-founded to look into the ethics of artificial intelligence. In a blog post, OpenAI said the decision had been taken to avoid any conflict of interest as Mr Musk's electric car company, Tesla, became "more focused on AI". He has been one of AI's most vocal critics, stressing the potential harms. Mr Musk will continue to donate to and advise the group. In 2014, Mr Musk said AI was humanity's biggest existential threat.

Elon Musk is stepping down from the board of a $1 billion AI organisation he helped create. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that the billionaire entrepreneur is exiting his role at the company to avoid potential conflicts of interest with his work at Tesla. Founded in 2015 with $1 billion in funding, OpenAI is a non-profit organisation focused on research about artificial intelligence technology and on examining its potential social implications and safety risks. It has developed AI capable of playing video games like "Dota 2," and earlier this week co-authored a report looking at how artificial intelligence technology could be abused for malicious purposes, from drone attacks to fraudulent videos. In a blog post published Tuesday, OpenAI said Musk was leaving its board, but will continue to provide funding and advice. "As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon," the post said.

I'm definitely not in some reputed position to be commenting or throwing irrational opinions around or take sides on such great thought processes that had been born decades before I was born, but consider these as thoughts of someone who has been closely following the works of pioneers of the field. I am just a believer of the idea that if AGI can be created one day in the future then deep learning is definitely going to have a vital role to play in its proper functioning. Companies like OpenAI inspire me and many others to believe that putting in hours into research and thinking about applications of AI will definitely yield amazing results that will revolutionize the way we live our lives. It would be something combining different fields of study like neuroscience, philosophy, mathematics, physics, computer science and many more that would together contribute in a masterpiece that would prove to be the best creation of mankind.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is stepping down from OpenAI's board amid concerns of a possible conflict of interest. Elon Musk will step down as chairman of OpenAI, the nonprofit artificial intelligence research company he co-founded two years ago, amid concerns of a possible conflict of interest. Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, will depart the board but continue to "donate and advise the organization," the OpenAI said in a blog post Tuesday. "As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon," OpenAI said. Research in artificial intelligence, a term used for the ability of machined, computers or systems to exhibit humanlike intelligence, has been dominated lately by large tech companies such as Google and Facebook.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is leaving the board of OpenAI, the nonprofit research group he co-founded with Y Combinator president Sam Altman to study the ethics and safety of artificial intelligence. The move was announced in a short blog post, explaining that Musk is leaving in order to avoid a conflict of interest between OpenAI's work and the machine learning research done by Telsa to develop autonomous driving. "As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon," says the post. Musk will stay on as a donator to OpenAI and will continue to advise the group. The blog post also announced a number of new donors, including video game developer Gabe Newell, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, and the former US and Canadian Olympians Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton.

If you weren't already worried about AI, the ominously named The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence report has just been released to fuel your nightmares. Written by 26 authors from 14 academic and industrial institutions and think tanks including nonprofit research OpenAI, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the national security think tank, Center for a New … Continue reading "AI is coming for you, warns ominous new study" ...

"For many decades hype outstripped fact in terms of AI and machine learning. "This report looks at the practices that just don't work anymore and suggests broad approaches that might help: for example, how to design software and hardware to make it less hackable - and what type of laws and international regulations might work in tandem with this." The report urges policy makers and researchers to work together to understand and prepare for how the technology could be used maliciously, and calls for developers to be proactive and mindful of how it could be misused. Those who contributed to the study include the Elon Musk-founded non-profit research firm OpenAI and international digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Abstract: The design of small molecules with bespoke properties is of central importance to drug discovery. However significant challenges yet remain for computational methods, despite recent advances such as deep recurrent networks and reinforcement learning strategies for sequence generation, and it can be difficult to compare results across different works. This work proposes 19 benchmarks selected by subject experts, expands smaller datasets previously used to approximately 1.1 million training molecules, and explores how to apply new reinforcement learning techniques effectively for molecular design. The benchmarks here, built as OpenAI Gym environments, will be open-sourced to encourage innovation in molecular design algorithms and to enable usage by those without a background in chemistry. Finally, this work explores recent development in reinforcement-learning methods with excellent sample complexity (the A2C and PPO algorithms) and investigates their behavior in molecular generation, demonstrating significant performance gains compared to standard reinforcement learning techniques.

In a new report, called The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the authors - who are made up of AI researchers and civil liberties groups - warn that if breakthroughs in AI continue at the current pace then technology will soon become so powerful that it will outmanoeuvre many digital and physical defence systems. Jack Clark, head of policy at OpenAI, San Francisco-based AI group whose backers include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, said: "What struck a lot of us was the amount that happened in the last five years -- if that continues, you see the chance of creating really dangerous things." The report also warns that drones and driverless cars could be commandeered and used as weapons and that malevolent AI could be used to organise swarms of drones. Also, political systems could be hacked by using tools for online advertising and commerce to manipulate voters.