Two robots in every kitchen: Elon Musk wants AI to handle domestic drudgery

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.