Infosys, Tesla's Elon Musk & others commit $1 bn to OpenAI

OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company

Infosys, Amazon Web Services and Silicon Valley leaders like Tesla's Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder) among others to commit $1 billion investment to OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company.

In a blog, OpenAI said Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka will join the organisation as an advisor along with Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay and Sergey Levine.

Sam Altman (Y Combinator), Greg Brockman (Stripe CTO), Musk, Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Jessica Livingston (Y Combinator), Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI, it said.

"In total, these funders have committed $1 billion, although we expect to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years," it added.

OpenAI said its 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".

"As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. 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," it said.

OpenAI will freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expects to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies, it added.

Bangalore-based Infosys has recently announced new services -- Aikido -- that focus on design thinking, platforms and knowledge-based IT to differentiate its offerings from rivals like TCS, Wipro and others.

The company is also aggressively investing and acquiring firms working in new areas like artificial intelligence, data analytics and machine learning.