Elon Musk's solution to your household chores: robots

The nonprofit group linked to Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley tech paragons wants to start with the basics -- household chores. Its No. 2 goal -- No. 1 being a decidedly more prosaic vow to measure its own progress in advancing artificial intelligence -- is to build a household robot, one to "perform basic housework," OpenAI said in a blog post this week. Sure, such a thing would be welcomed the world over. But what makes this future housemaid robot rank so highly among the group's ideas and experiments is that robotics in general is a "good testbed for many challenges in (artificial intelligence)," Open AI says. OpenAI dubs itself "a non-profit artificial intelligence research company" with the goal of advancing AI in ways most likely to benefit humanity, all the while uninhibited by the need to generate a profit.