Infy joins Elon Musk in backing artificial intelligence venture

Infosys has joined a few global technology companies and entrepreneurs to support a non-profit research venture into artificial intelligence.

OpenAI, which was launched on Friday, is supported by Amazon Web Services; Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla; and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston, both from Y Combinator, have also committed to the funding. "In total, these funders have committed $1 billion, although we expect to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years," the newly formed company announced in a blog post.

The founders of the initiative have roped in Ilya Sutskever, a former Google research scientist, as research director. Greg Brockman, a former chief technology officer at payments startup Stripe, has joined as chief technology officer.

"We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely," OpenAI's blogpost said.

"Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," it added.

Artificial intelligence has been a pet subject of Infosys Chief Executive Officer Vishal Sikka, who also holds a PhD in the subject from Stanford University.

After he joined Infosys in August last year from German software maker SAP, Sikka is trying to steer the company back to industry-leading growth by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and other automated tools.

"There are concerns these days that AI is going to replace us. My deeply held belief having studied this (subject) for several decades is that AI can be a great amplifier of our ability," Sikka had said in a keynote address at the Oracle OpenWorld at San Francisco in October this year.

As a part of its funding commitment, the quantum of which was not disclosed by Infosys, Sikka will join the initiative as an adviser. Elon Musk and Sam Altman will co-chair the company.

"As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders," said the OpenAI post. "Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We'll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies," it added.

IN THE OPEN
Many technology majors are making their artificial intelligence technology open source, to accelerate development:

• Google: Shared underlying code of its AI engine TensorFlow
   
• Facebook: Shared designs for computer servers, code-name Big Sur, it has built to run AI algorithms
   
• Microsoft: Distributed machine-learning toolkit (DMTK) on GitHub
   
• IBM: Transferred its SystemML machine-learning software to Apache Software Foundation, which supports open-source projects