Elon Musk’s openAI project says it is working on a robot to clean people’s houses

Building a robot that can help people in their homes will be a good way of testing the future of AI, Musk’s research group says – and so to ensure that they don’t take over the world and kill us

Elon Musk with a SpaceX capsule – the kind that will carry him away to Mars if his plans for robots go wrong (AP)

Elon Musk’s $1 billion artificial intelligence group wants to build a robot to clean people’s houses.

OpenAI – which is funded by the billionaire maker of reusable rockets and electric cars – hopes to build a domestic robot as a test of its research into how to build artificial intelligence that won’t kill us.

Building such a robot isn’t just a way of getting rid of household chores, according to a blog entry posted by the nonprofit research group. It would also be a neat way of testing whether or not its work in artificial intelligence is progressing in the right way.

There are already ways of creating a robot that can carry out specific tasks, the researchers note. The difference is that Musk’s team hopes to create “learning algorithms” that would allow the creation to serve as a “general purpose” robot – meaning that it can be left around the home and be clever enough to work out what it needs to do to clean.

Creating such a robot is a “good testbed for many challenges in AI”, the team note. The robot won’t be built by OpenAI, but instead use components from elsewhere that are programmed by the group.

Creating a household robot is the second goal of the OpenAI group, according to blog post. It has already detailed its work in meeting goal one – “Measure our progress” – when it laid out plans for a special gym that can help train artificial intelligence programs.

The goals that follow are building an agent that can understand natural language and creating one that could solve a “wide variety of games”. OpenAI hopes that the different goals capture different kinds of problem-solving and together can progress towards its goal of building smart AI systems that don’t also wipe out life on Earth.