Elon Musk, Silicon Valley Rallying Against Robot Domination

Robots against humanity?

While a number of Fortune 500 companies are spurring Artificial Intelligence (AI) studies by putting dollars in R&D -- Apple, Google, and Facebook to name a few -- there are big names in Silicon Valley campaigning to pull on the other side of the rope.

Open AI, a non-profit research group funded by Silicon Valley personalities Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and others, aims to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole." The new group launched Friday has $1 billion in accumulated donations from previously mentioned tech leaders.

According to a report by CNET, Musk, Althman and Thiel's investment are significant in such a way they've already made their mark in building future technologies. Musk leads electric-car maker Tesla as its CEO and a private space company called SpaceX. In addition, he was also the co-founder of mobile payment platform Paypal.

Altman, on the other hand, gave wings to startup companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twitch.

Well-known Silicon Valley investor Thiel also co-founded PayPal along with Musk. He is also known for investing in Facebook during its incubation.

Apart from the three Silicon Valley big shots, Open AI also boasts of a team coming with Ivy League diplomas under their belts. These "accomplished AI researchers" are Stanford, UC Berkeley and NYU graduates, according to PCWorld.

Famous computer scientist Alan Kay is also a part of the research movement, along with tech giants Amazon Web Services and Infosys. Open AI is led by Ilya Sutskever, a research scientist at Google, who is the research group's CTO. Musk and Altman is positioned in the organizational chart as Open AI's co-chairs.

PC World clarifies that OpenAI will not be developing products but will, instead, focus on pure research.

"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," the organization said in a statement via Open AI's official website.

"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," the statement furthered.

It is good to note, however, that Open AI did not pioneer the effort to address AI domination concerns. An open letter from the Future of Life Institute was signed by experts around the globe which pledges to safely and carefully coordinate progress in the field, as per CNET.

Musk, co-founders of British AI company Deep Mind (which was purchased by Google in January 2014), MIT professors, tech industry experts such as IBM's Watson supercomputer team and Microsoft Research signed the petition.