Elon Musk's OpenAI is using Reddit to teach AI to speak like humans

OpenAI wants to build the technology that will finally create a computer that can converse in a way that is indistinguishable humans. The nonprofit, backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, brought on NVIDIA's supercomputer DGX-1, which has 170 teraflops of computing power, to help hone machine learning systems to create algorithms that can comprehend language and teach robots to respond appropriately. That should solve one of the biggest hindrances to making AI systems that can learn complex interactions: the slowness of current computers. "The speed of our computers is in some sense the lifeblood of deep learning," OpenAI research director Ilya Sutskever in an NVIDIA video. The goal of this project is to allow a robot to become smart enough to not only recognize speech, but to also use the data it gathers to formulate appropriate responses on its own--and to do that, computers need to digest data more quickly than they are currently capable of. The DGX-1, which is optimized for an arm of machine learning called deep learning, can feed copious amounts of natural language data into OpenAI's network much quicker than ever before.