Partnership on AI – Formed by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and IBM

Partnership on AI – The top five technology companies namely Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are joining forces to create a new organisation called “Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society,” and it has a few goals other than to make sure people know that AI research isn’t all about creating killer robots.

Partnership on AI will support related research and recommend best practices in ethics, transparency and privacy when it comes to artificial intelligence studies. The project also aims to create an open platform where researchers and major players in the industry can communicate.

The Partnership on AI’s Website explains its tenet – “We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people’s lives and can be leveraged to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health, and education.”

Interestingly Apple and Elon Musk are not part of this society. Elon Musk even set up a non-profit organisation called OpenAI in 2015.

Each of the founding member company has a representative on board Partnership on AI. The current list includes – Ralf Herbrich from Amazon, Mustafa Suleyman from DeepMind/Google, Yann LeCun from Facebook, Francesca Rossi from IBM, and Eric Horvitz from Microsoft.

Financial support will be coming from the initial tech companies that are members of the group, but in the future, membership and involvement are expected to increase. User activists, nonprofits, ethicists and other stakeholders will be joining the discussion in the coming weeks.

“We want to involve people impacted by AI as well,” said Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and head of applied Artificial Intelligence at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet.

Overall the goal of Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to ensure that “applications of Artificial Intelligence are beneficial to people and society.”