5 things you should know about the plan to open source artificial intelligence

Arguably, the open source movement -- the idea that a group of technologists freely contributing their own work and commenting on the work of others, can create a final product that is comparable with anything that a commercial enterprise might create -- has been one of the great innovation catalysts of the technology industry. It's no wonder, then, that a group of Silicon Valley luminaries -- including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman -- have lined up to contribute $1 billion to a new open-source AI project known as OpenAI that is led by Ilya Sutskever, one of the world's top experts in machine learning. For now, we don't really know. The OpenAI website is basically just a single blog post outlining the organization's manifesto and an "About" page detailing all the technologists and engineers working on the project. Thus far, we only have a long announcement from the founding members that they are going to do something amazing.