Introducing YC AI

Over the past decade, deep and recurrent neural networks have hugely improved the capabilities of machine learning. So far, the clearest success stories have occurred in supervised learning. There, systems using neural networks have blown away the prior state of the art in object recognition (in images) and speech recognition, and they are close to surpassing the state of the art in machine translation.

In upcoming decades, many AI researchers hope to create artificial general intelligence. While no one knows the timeline, AGI's development will be one of the most important moments in our history. We think that AGI, just like the International Space Station, should be a feat accomplished by humankind and owned by the world. There will be many problems to solve along the way (ranging from job displacement to existential risk), and the best outcome will come from having our best minds working together.

The first group in YC Research, YC AI, will build on the recent advances in AI and work towards the next set of breakthroughs in unsupervised and reinforcement learning. Our long-term goal is to build beneficial AGI.

Increasingly, the world is seeing lots of narrow AIs that extend human capabilities: an AI that drives your car, an AI that manages your house, and so on. We think the most promising long-term future is a direct extension of this: one with distributed AGI that co-evolves with human society, where there are many independent agents working with many different humans. The emergent culture should be one that deeply values and empowers humans, and one where intelligent agents cooperate rather than try to control each other.

As with the rest of YCR, the work this group does will, at the researchers' discretion and with an exception for safety, be shared freely with the world. We expect to collaborate with many others in academia and industry.

YC AI'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 Keith Adams, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Yoshua Bengio, Alan Kay, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk will be advisors.

Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon, Infosys, and Y Combinator are donating to support YC AI. In total, these funders have committed more than $100M.

Regardless of how far off AGI is, we all think the right investments now can improve its ultimate outcome. While we're very excited to have brought together such a great group of people, we know that the real work is ahead of us. There'll be a lot to share and debate over upcoming months and years, but for now our main focus will be on getting the project off the ground.

You can follow us on Twitter at @yc_ai or email us at ai@ycr.org.

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