Lifeboat Foundation

The news this month is full of stories about money pouring into AI research. First we got the news about the $15 million granted to the new Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence. Then Elon Musk and friends dropped the news about launching OpenAI to the tune of $1 billion, promising that this would be a not-for-profit company committed to safe AI and improving the world. But that all pales in comparison to the $12-$15 billion that the Pentagon is requesting for the development of AI weapons.

According to Reuters, “The Pentagon’s fiscal 2017 budget request will include $12 billion to $15 billion to fund war gaming, experimentation and the demonstration of new technologies aimed at ensuring a continued military edge over China and Russia.” The military is looking to develop more advanced weapons technologies that will include autonomous weapons and deep learning machines.

While the research itself would be strictly classified, the military wants to ensure that countries like China and Russia know this advanced weapons research is taking place.

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(credit: OpenAI)

Elon Musk and associates announced OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company, on Friday (Dec. 11), committing $1 billion toward their goal 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.”

The funding comes from a group of tech leaders including Musk, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Amazon Web Services, but the venture expects to only spend “a tiny fraction of this in the next few years.”

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Its long-range goal will be to create an “artificial general intelligence,” a machine capable of performing any intellectual task that a human being can, according to Mr. Musk. He also stressed that the focus was on building technologies that augment rather than replace humans.

The investors — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman — said they planned to commit $1 billion to the project long term, but would initially spend only a small fraction of that amount in the first few years of the project. But, Mr. Musk said, “Everyone who is listed as a contributor has made a substantial commitment and this should be viewed as at least a billion-dollar project.”

The organization, to be named OpenAI, will be established as a nonprofit, and will be based in San Francisco.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKORsrlN-2k

Tesla Powerwall Keynote by Elon Musk “The Missing Piece”

English and Spanish subtitles added, credit to Luis Gámez for transcribing and translating.

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One of his companies is trying to upend the auto industry. Another of his companies is trying to put people on Mars. Yet another is trying to bring electricity to everyone who needs it. Elon Musk wants to reinvent the world in a single lifetime. But is the future ready for Elon Musk?

Following the current fashion for visionary technological geniuses to be portrayed through three critical moments in their lives, * here are three from Elon Musk’s. Except, in this case, they all come from one single day—October 12, 2015, a Monday—a day that feels like it could’ve been pretty much any day in Musk’s life right now.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Is Ready to Conquer Mars” »

“[O]nly a carbon tax—not innovation, conservation, or renewable energy—will accelerate the transition from carbon-producing fossil fuels to sustainable energy.”

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Private spaceflight company Blue Origin, helmed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, says it has landed its main rocket, New Shepard, back on Earth after launch. That would make it the first rocket ever to have gently landed and remained intact after taking off into space. It also means that Blue Origin has beaten SpaceX in the race to make the first reusable rocket; the Elon Musk-led space venture has been trying to soft-land its main rocket, the Falcon 9, for the past year.

To commemorate the landing, Bezos tweeted for the first time since setting up his Twitter account seven years ago.

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Short Bytes: Artificial Intelligence holds a special place in the future of the humanity. Many tech giants, including Facebook, have long been working on improving the AI to make lives better. Facebook has decided to reveal its milestones in Artificial Intelligence Research in the form of a progress report.

It doesn’t matter if you are scared of AI like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking or if you have an opinion same as that of Google’s chief of Artificial Intelligence that computers are remarkably dumb. Companies are still going through the byzantine process of training the machines and creating human brain algorithms. Meanwhile, Facebook has just announced its progress report.

Facebook’s AI research team (FAIR) will present at NIPS, an Artificial Intelligence conference, its report card and reveal the team’s achievements regarding its state-of-the-art systems. Facebook has been trying to improve the image recognition and has created a system that speeds up the process by 30% using 10 times less training data from previous benchmarks.

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During the press conference for the release of the Autopilot, Tesla CEO Elon Musk referred to each Model S owners as “expert trainers” – meaning that each driver will train the autonomous features of the system to feed the collective network intelligence of the fleet by simply driving the electric vehicle on Autopilot.

He said that the system should improve everyday, but that improvements might only become noticeable every week or so by adding up. Just a few weeks after the release, Model S owners are already taking to the Tesla Motors Club forum to describe how the Autopilot is improving…

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