If Elon Musk can help it, you may never have to vacuum, clean dishes or fold laundry again.
The Tesla and SpaceX founder also leads OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research firm, and he and other OpenAI leaders just announced a project that could make all of our lives easier. The nonprofit is working on the technology for an AI robot that could do all of your household chores for you.
“There are existing techniques for specific tasks, but we believe that learning algorithms can eventually be made reliable enough to create a general-purpose robot,” the blog post, where Musk and fellow OpenAI leaders Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockton made the announcement, reads.
The post goes on to say that robotics is a good testbed for many challenges in AI and that the nonprofit will be making this technology available but not manufacturing any robots themselves. OpenAI’s mission is to promote and develop open-source friendly AI in ways that will benefit society as a whole, so the technology developed by them as a part of this project will be made available to anyone who wants to use it for a physical robot.
The post also details OpenAI’s other technical goals.
“Defining a metric for intelligence is tricky, but we need one to measure our progress and focus our research. We’re thus building a living metric which measures how well an agent can achieve its user’s intended goal in a wide range of environments,’ reads goal number one.
The company is also determined to build an agent with useful natural language understanding. As we’ve reported before, this is one of the field’s biggest hurdles.
