Called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, its main aims are to improve public understanding of and engagement with AI, as well as to formulate standards for future researchers to abide by. It will be focussed on research and determining the best practices in this field, as oppose to being a lobbying group.
The five companies are famous for their strong links to artificial intelligence, with high-profile acquisitions of AI startups from Google and Microsoft recently. Such a collaboration has been sought before. DeepMind, bought by Google in 2014, ensured that part of the acquisition saw Google promise to form an ethics board, intent that the technology is not misused. This new partnership can be seen as an ideal complement.
Notable by their absence is Apple which is very publicly involved with developing AI systems, such as its Siri personal assistant. Apple is known to operate solitarily in many regards, only reluctantly joining the coalition of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and Microsoft in opposition to the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill in March of this year. It remains to be seen if Apple will join this partnership. Elon Musk's OpenAI is the absentee, though they have already spoken of the partnership as being a positive influence.
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