北京时间今天（12月12日）早间消息，特斯拉CEO伊隆·马斯克(Elon Musk)周五在Twitter上宣布，启动非盈利人工智能项目OpenAI。OpenAI表示，该公司的使命是“发展数字智能，使其符合人类整体的利益，同时不受财务回报的限制”。这与马斯克对于人工智能及其所带来威胁的观点一致。2014年，马斯克表示，他的投资“并不站在获得任何投资回报的立场上，我只是想看看，人工智能会有什么样的发展”。
他当时还表示：“我认为，我们对待人工智能应当非常谨慎。如果让我猜测，人类最大的威胁是什么，那么就是人工智能。因此我们需要非常谨慎。我越来越感觉到，这里应当有一定的监管，或许是在全国层面，或许是国际层面，这只是为了确保我们不会去做一些蠢事。”
由于人工智能有着令人惊讶的历史，因此我们还很难预测，达到人类水平的人工智能将于何时出现。目前预测OpenAI的未来还为时过早。OpenAI计划扮演人工智能技术监督者的角色，判断不同的机器智能项目能否实现最终目标。
该公司的其他创始成员包括多名知名工程师和科学家，Y Combinator的萨姆·阿尔特曼(Sam Altman)和马斯克将担任联席董事长。雷德·霍夫曼(Reid Hoffman)、杰西卡·利文斯顿(Jessica Livingston)、彼得·泰尔(Peter Thiel)、亚马逊AWS、Infosys和YC Research将为OpenAI提供资金。到目前为止，OpenAI获得的投资承诺达到10亿美元。
目前，该公司将启动招聘，招募研究工程师和科学家。谷歌机器学习科学家伊尔亚·苏茨克维(Ilya Sutskever)将担任该公司的研究主管。OpenAI旗下研究人员的成果将被鼓励发表成论文，而该公司获得的专利将被分享给全世界。

附伊隆·马斯克的OpenAI说明全文：

Introducing OpenAI
by Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and the OpenAI team 
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company.  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.
OpenAI是一个非营利性的人工智能研究公司。我们的目标是以最有可能造福全人类的方式，来发展数字智能，而不为盈利所左右。
Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.  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.
因为我们的研究没有赚钱的压力或者说盈利的义务，,我们可以更好地关注人工智能人类的积极影响。我们相信人工智能应该是每个人的个人意志和,自由的精神扩展，而且是在最大和最安全的范围之内。
The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the work is difficult, but we believe the goal and the structure are right.  We hope this is what matters most to the best in the field.
这种研究充满不确定性，而且研究工作本身也有难度,但我们相信我们的目标和思路是正确的。我们希望这项研究是人工智能领域最重要的方面。
Background
背景
Artificial intelligence has always been a surprising field.  In the early days, people thought that solving certain tasks (such as chess) would lead us to discover human-level intelligence algorithms.  However, the solution to each task turned out to be much less general than people were hoping (such as doing a search over a huge number of moves).
人工智能一直是一个令人惊叹的研究领域。在早期,人们认为解决某些任务(如国际象棋)就会让我们发现人类智能的算法。然而,每个任务的解决方案都被证明，比我们期待的智能更加狭隘。
The past few years have held another flavor of surprise.  An AI technique explored for decades, deep learning, started achieving state-of-the-art results in a wide variety of problem domains.  In deep learning, rather than hand-code a new algorithm for each problem, you design architectures that can twist themselves into a wide range of algorithms based on the data you feed them.
过去几年又有一个令人惊讶的领域，就是深度学习，这项人工智能技术已经进行了几十年，现在已经在很多应用领域产生了成果。通过深入学习,而不是针对每个问题人工写一个算法,我们可以让系统根据我们不断添加给它的数据自己生成算法。
This approach has yielded outstanding results on pattern recognition problems, such as recognizing objects in images, machine translation, and speech recognition.  But we’ve also started to see what it might be like for computers to be creative, to dream, and to experience the world.
通过这种途径，在模式识别方面已经取得了很多不错的成果，比如图像识别,机器翻译和语音识别。我们甚至还注意到，电脑有了创造力,梦想,能体验世界，会是什么样子。
Looking forward
展望
AI systems today have impressive but narrow capabilities.  It seems that we’ll keep whittling away at their constraints, and in the extreme case they will reach human performance on virtually every intellectual task.  It’s hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly.
今天的人工智能是令人惊叹的但也是智能狭隘的。我们将不断给它扩充功能，甚至在每个具体的工作上，都能达到人的智能水平。不过我们很难预见，达到人类智能的人工智能究竟能给我们带来多大的好处，也同样很难预见它会给我们带来多大的坏处，尤其是我们如果使用不当的话。
OpenAI 
Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach.  When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.
正是因为人工智能的惊人发展史,我们很难预测究竟在何时，人工智能会达到人的智能水平。也许很快，而我们希望在那个临界点，会有一个研究机构能够带头站出来，来优化人工智能的好处，给人类谋福祉。
We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution.  As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders.  Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world.  We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.
所以我们想成立OpenAI这样一个研究机构。作为一个非营利组织,我们的目标是为每个人创造价值,而不是为股东谋利益。我们强烈支持鼓励研究人员把他们的成果发布出来，不管是通过报纸也好,还是博客也好、不管是发布代码也好还是专利，只要是有的话，我们就要与全世界共享。我们将与尽可能多的其他研究机构展开广泛合作，甚至与企业合作去研发和应用新的人工智能技术。
OpenAI’s research director is Ilya Sutskever, one of the world experts in machine learning.  Our CTO is Greg Brockman, formerly the CTO of Stripe.  The group’s other founding members are world-class research engineers and scientists: Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba.  Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, and Vishal Sikka are advisors to the group.  OpenAI’s co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
OpenAI研究负责任Ilya Sutskever 是世界机器学习专家之一。我们的首席技术官格雷格•布鲁克曼，以前是Stripe的首席技术官。创始人还有世界级的研究工程师和科学家:Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba.  以下几位：Pieter Abbeel, Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sergey Levine, 和Vishal Sikka 担任我们的顾问.  Y Combinator的萨姆·阿尔特曼(Sam Altman)和马斯克将担任联席董事长。
Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI.  In total, these funders have committed $1 billion, although we expect to only spend a tiny fraction of this in the next few years.
雷德·霍夫曼(Reid Hoffman)、杰西卡·利文斯顿(Jessica Livingston)、彼得·泰尔(Peter Thiel)、亚马逊AWS、Infosys和YC Research将为OpenAI提供资金。到目前为止，OpenAI获得的投资承诺达到10亿美元。当然，我们希望未来几年，我们会只花费其中的一小部分。