Elon Musk leaves board of AI safety group to avoid conflict of interest with Tesla

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.