OpenAI, a nonprofit created by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs to make fundamental breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, has said that one of its big goals will be teaching robots to do the laundry and other household chores. OpenAI doesn't want to make robot hardware itself but, rather, to supply the brains for off-the-shelf bots. You might think that learning to fold underpants is a modest goal, but such dexterity and adaptability is one of the grand challenges of robotics. It also fits with the organization's stated objective to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole." Applying the sort of machine-learning techniques OpenAI is working on to robotics should, in fact, have huge practical benefits, and it will be a necessary component of any more general form of artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk has built cars and rockets. OpenAI - the artificial-intelligence research nonprofit cochaired 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 customizing it to do housework. "More generally, robotics is a good test bed for many challenges in AI," reads the blog entry.

Google has released a paper on AI safety in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and OpenAI.

Musk's warnings should be heeded. OpenAI is his less dramatic way of confronting this threat. By making everything "open," humanity has a greater opportunity to control the growth and direction of AI. But NPQ readers might want to ask if anyone other than tech leaders should be making these decisions. Silicon Valley is at the center of innovation, but ethics and many other concerns are forced to the forefront with the advent of AI. Should there be government or United Nations oversight?

There's been much talk about how artificial intelligence will benefit society, but what about the potential impacts that AI has when the system is poorly designed and creates problems? This is a question several researchers and OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company, tackled in a recent paper. The paper was written by researchers from Google Brain, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as John Schulman, research scientist at OpenAI. It's titled Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and it looks at research problems around ensuring that modern machine learning systems operate as intended. Researchers have started to focus on safety research in the machine learning community, including a recent paper from DeepMind and the Future of Humanity Institute that looked at how to make sure that human interventions during the learning process would not induce a bias toward undesirable behaviors in machine learning robots. But, according to a blog post by OpenAI, many machine learning researchers are wondering just how much safety research can be done today.

Google Research cooperated with OpenAI, Stanford University, and the University of California to publish a research paper highlighting the five main problems with machine learning systems that can lead to accidents. The problems, although minor now, can escalate to concerning levels during artificial intelligence development and operation.

Google has released technical paper on AI safety produced in collaboration with researchers from Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and OpenAI.

In a Monday blog post, the leadership of artificial intelligence (AI) research company OpenAI said that the group wants to modify'off-the-shelf' robots so they can perform common household tasks. "We're working to enable a physical robot (off-the-shelf; not manufactured by OpenAI) to perform basic housework," the group said in a blog post authored by Research Director Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Greg Brockman, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. This futuristic target is second only to the primary goal laid out in the organization's blog post, which is to develop AI that could learn to improve its ability over time. Meeting such a goal would provide an underpinning for the perhaps more glamorous concept of robots that can clean your home, but the post goes onto say that domestic robots themselves would provide a solid foundation for approaching other problems in AI. "There are existing techniques for specific tasks, but we believe that learning algorithms can eventually be made reliable enough to create a general-purpose robot. More generally, robotics is a good testbed for many challenges in AI," the blog post reads.

There's been much talk about how artificial intelligence will benefit society, but what about the potential impacts that AI has when the system is poorly designed and creates problems? This is a question several researchers and OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company, tackled in a recent paper. The paper was written by researchers from Google Brain, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as John Schulman, research scientist at OpenAI. It's titled Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and it looks at research problems around ensuring that modern machine learning systems operate as intended. Researchers have started to focus on safety research in the machine learning community, including a recent paper from DeepMind and the Future of Humanity Institute that looked at how to make sure that human interventions during the learning process would not induce a bias toward undesirable behaviors in machine learning robots.

It's a little bit like Rosie from "The Jetsons" -- Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company OpenAI is working to create a very capable robot that could help you around the house. The company's CTO Greg Brockman and co-chairs Elon Musk and Sam Altman published a blog post Monday announcing OpenAI's plans to develop what is basically a robot butler. "We're working to enable a physical robot (off-the-shelf; not manufactured by OpenAI) to perform basic housework," the post reads. "There are existing techniques for specific tasks, but we believe that learning algorithms can eventually be made reliable enough to create a general-purpose robot. More generally, robotics is a good testbed for many challenges in AI."