The billion-dollar OpenAI initiative announced last week by Elon Musk and company recalls DARPA’s Grand Challenge, the X-Prize, and MIT Media Lab’s One Laptop Per Child initiative – innovative institutional mechanisms explicitly designed to attract top talent and worldwide attention to worthy problems. They can work well, and my bet is that the OpenAI will goad a similar competitive response — smart companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Baidu, and Alibaba will immediately recognize that the so-called “not for profit” issues the researchers identify need to be incorporated in their own AI/ML technology roadmaps.
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Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning’s online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Ethics at Work. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.
Avoid integrity traps in the workplace.