Elon Musk's 1 billion nonprofit wants to build a robot to do housework

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.