Dive Brief:

• Several large tech companies and investors have collectively donated $1 billion to a new artificial intelligence research organization called OpenAI, NBC News reports.
• The organization will focus on deep learning and human-like thinking.
• Researchers for OpenAI will be encouraged to publish their work publicly and collaborate with other institutions.

Dive Insight:

Several prominent investors and companies, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Infosys and AWS, donated to make the organization financially independent.

“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," according to the organization’s introductory blog.

In addition to advancing AI, the group says their mission is also to learn how to apply it ethically and effectively.

"It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society," the blog post says, "and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly. 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 research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning, and their CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly of Stripe.