Three billionaires who launched PayPal and then went on to even greater success in their next ventures are now trying to make sure that artificial intelligence does more good than harm to humans.
PayPal ringleaders Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman are joining forces with several other technology luminaries and companies to contribute $1 billion to finance a Silicon Valley research center that will dig deeper into the field of artificial intelligence, or "machine learning."
The nonprofit company, called OpenAI, will focus on improving "digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole."
Musk, who has amassed an estimated fortune of $13 billion, has been particularly outspoken about his fears that computers could work against humans if the efforts to develop artificial intelligence go awry. He made waves last year when he described artificial intelligence as a potential "demon" and our "biggest existential threat."
OpenAI will be run by Ilya Sutskever, who spent the past three years working for Google's "brain team" that focused on machine learning.
Although he first got rich as a PayPal co-founder, Musk has made far more money as CEO of electric car maker Tesla Motors and rocket ship maker Space X.
Thiel, PayPal's former CEO, is better known as one of Facebook's early investors and a critic of college education. His fortune is currently estimated at about $3 billion.
Hoffman was one of PayPal's first employees and then went on to co-found professional networking service LinkedIn Corp., which accounts for most of his estimated fortune of about $4 billion.
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