Elon Musk - business tycoon and founder of various public and private companies including SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company - has announced that he is leaving the OpenAI Board. OpenAI is yet another company formed by Musk that researches the concept of "safer" artificial intelligence which can be beneficial to mankind.
In the past, Musk has been openly critical of the "AI threat", going so far as to say the following to U.S. governors:
I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal.
With AI now being a crucial component of electric cars developed by Tesla, Musk will be leaving OpenAI, in order to avoid chances of a potential conflict of interest in the future. However, he will remain an advisor and donor to the firm.
In an apparent restructuring of the research company, Pieter Abbeel, Julia Galef, and Maran Nelson have been tapped as advisors to OpenAI. Furthermore, numerous people including Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, Jed McCaleb, Michael Seibel, Jaan Tallinn, and athletes Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton will be donating to the organization.
We’re broadening our base of funders to prepare for the next phase of OpenAI, which will involve ramping up our investments in our people and the compute resources necessary to make consequential breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. OpenAI was founded a little over two years ago and since that time we’ve paired our research efforts with applied work to push the limits of what AI systems are capable of via our work in roboticsand Dota. That’s going to continue, and in the coming months you can also expect us to articulate the principles with which we’ll be approaching the next phase of OpenAI, and the policy areas in which we wish to see changes to ensure AI benefits all of humanity.
The OpenAI board now consists of the following members: Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Holden Karnofsky, and Sam Altman. The firm says that it plans to find a new director soon and may decide to increase the number of members on the board in the future as well.