Musk's AI startup releases initial codebase

Elon Musk’s OpenAI startup this week released its first initial codebase for exploring the development of artificially intelligent systems via “reinforcement learning”; one of the latest software toolkits that can teach the neural networks of machines to learn tasks through repetition and tracking through identification of methods that generate the best results. OpenAI also intends to examine “unsupervised learning” to create machines that are capable of solitary deep learning from neural nets, thereby negating the need for humans to supervise the labelling of data for AI text and image recognition. The startup hopes the open source nature of the codebase may accelerate the progress of AI, and eventually optimise its commercial viability by encouraging the free sharing of vital research through this not-for-profit initiative.

The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December.

But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn't that no one was looking. It was that everyone was looking. When some of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI's freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers---some made at the conference itself---were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup. "The amount of money was borderline crazy," says Wojciech Zaremba, a researcher who was joining OpenAI after internships at both Google and Facebook and was among those who received big offers at the eleventh hour.

How many dollars is "borderline crazy"? Two years ago, as the market for the latest machine learning technology really started to heat up, Microsoft Research vice president Peter Lee said that the cost of a top AI researcher had eclipsed the cost of a top quarterback prospect in the National Football League---and he meant under regular circumstances, not when two of the most famous entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were trying to poach your top talent. Zaremba says that as OpenAI was coming together, he was offered two or three times his market value.

OpenAI didn't match those offers. But it offered something else: the chance to explore research aimed solely at the future instead of products and quarterly earnings, and to eventually share most---if not all---of this research with anyone who wants it. That's right: Musk, Altman, and company aim to give away what may become the 21st century's most transformative technology---and give it away for free.

Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

Zaremba says those borderline crazy offers actually turned him off---despite his enormous respect for companies like Google and Facebook. He felt like the money was at least as much of an effort to prevent the creation of OpenAI as a play to win his services, and it pushed him even further towards the startup's magnanimous mission. "I realized," Zaremba says, "that OpenAI was the best place to be."

That's the irony at the heart of this story: even as the world's biggest tech companies try to hold onto their researchers with the same fierceness that NFL teams try to hold onto their star quarterbacks, the researchers themselves just want to share. In the rarefied world of AI research, the brightest minds aren't driven by---or at least not only by---the next product cycle or profit margin. They want to make AI better, and making AI better doesn't happen when you keep your latest findings to yourself.

OpenAI is a billion-dollar effort to push AI as far as it will go.

This morning, OpenAI will release its first batch of AI software, a toolkit for building artificially intelligent systems by way of a technology called "reinforcement learning"---one of the key technologies that, among other things, drove the creation of AlphaGo, the Google AI that shocked the world by mastering the ancient game of Go. With this toolkit, you can build systems that simulate a new breed of robot, play Atari games, and, yes, master the game of Go.

But game-playing is just the beginning. OpenAI is a billion-dollar effort to push AI as far as it will go. In both how the company came together and what it plans to do, you can see the next great wave of innovation forming. We're a long way from knowing whether OpenAI itself becomes the main agent for that change. But the forces that drove the creation of this rather unusual startup show that the new breed of AI will not only remake technology, but remake the way we build technology.

AI Everywhere

Silicon Valley is not exactly averse to hyperbole. It's always wise to meet bold-sounding claims with skepticism. But in the field of AI, the change is real. Inside places like Google and Facebook, a technology called deep learning is already helping Internet services identify faces in photos, recognize commands spoken into smartphones, and respond to Internet search queries. And this same technology can drive so many other tasks of the future. It can help machines understand natural language---the natural way that we humans talk and write. It can create a new breed of robot, giving automatons the power to not only perform tasks but learn them on the fly. And some believe it can eventually give machines something close to common sense---the ability to truly think like a human.

But along with such promise comes deep anxiety. Musk and Altman worry that if people can build AI that can do great things, then they can build AI that can do awful things, too. They’re not alone in their fear of robot overlords, but perhaps counterintuitively, Musk and Altman also think that the best way to battle malicious AI is not to restrict access to artificial intelligence but expand it. That's part of what has attracted a team of young, hyper-intelligent idealists to their new project.

OpenAI began one evening last summer in a private room at Silicon Valley's Rosewood Hotel---an upscale, urban, ranch-style hotel that sits, literally, at the center of the venture capital world along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. Elon Musk was having dinner with Ilya Sutskever, who was then working on the Google Brain, the company's sweeping effort to build deep neural networks---artificially intelligent systems that can learn to perform tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data, including everything from recognizing photos to writing email messages to, well, carrying on a conversation. Sutskever was one of the top thinkers on the project. But even bigger ideas were in play.