Major technology firms have joined forces on artificial intelligence (AI), aiming to cooperate on “best practices” on using the technology “to benefit people and society.”
Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc, Google, Facebook Inc, International Business Machines Corp and Google-owned British artificial intelligence firm DeepMind on Wednesday announced a nonprofit organization called “Partnership on AI” focused on helping the public understand the technology and practices in the field.
The move comes amid concerns that artificial intelligence efforts could spin out of control and end up being detrimental to society.
The companies “will conduct research, recommend best practices and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology,” a statement said.
Academics, nonprofit groups and specialists in policy and ethics are to be invited to join the board of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.
Microsoft on Thursday took a step further on AI, announcing a unit devoted to “democratizing” the technology, with more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers.
Microsoft expected its new AI research group to speed up putting human-like thinking into virtual assistants, applications, services and computing infrastructures.
“We are focused on empowering both people and organizations, by democratizing access to intelligence to help solve our most pressing challenges,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a release. “To do this, we are infusing AI into everything we deliver across our computing platforms and experiences.”
The new unit is to include scientists from Microsoft Research, the Bing and Cortana product groups and its “ambient computing” and robotics teams.
Late last year, SpaceX founder and Tesla Motors Inc CEO Elon Musk took part in creating nonprofit research company OpenAI, which is devoted to developing AI that will help people and not hurt them.
Musk found himself in the middle of a technology world controversy by holding firm that AI could turn on humanity and be its ruin instead of salvation.
Google, Apple Inc, Facebook and Microsoft are among technology giants that have been investing in making machines smarter, contending the goal is to improve lives.
“If we create some digital superintelligence that exceeds us in every way by a lot, it is very important that it be benign,” Musk said in June.
A danger, he contended, was that highly advanced AI would be left to its own devices, or in the hands of a few people, to the detriment of civilization as a whole.
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