Elon Musk's OpenAI: Artificial Intelligence vs. Real Idealism -- The Startup

Sometimes I think Elon Musk may single-handedly be increasing the coolness quotient of the entire human race. I mean seriously, the man is running three companies poised to change the course of entire industries and he has time to take step back and think "alright, guess I'll save humanity while I'm at it too, I guess" Last week, OpenAI released OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms. Today, with the power or control to develop the next generation of AI technology clearly in the hands of an elite group of companies whose motives may be driven by corporate interests and financial gains, I see the motive behind Elon Musk and Sam Altman's OpenAI venture. It is an attempt to put checks and bounds in place to "save us from ourselves", so to speak. Let's step back from the world of artificial intelligence for a second and think about a biological process we all are familiar with -- evolution.