Overseen by ex-Googler Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman, the former CTO of high-profile payments startup Stripe, OpenAI has the talent to compete with the industry's top artificial intelligence outfits, including Google and Facebook—but the company has been setup as a non-profit. "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," Brockman said in a blog post.

The apparent aim is to build systems based on deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has proven extremely adept in recent years at identifying images, recognizing spoken words, translating from one language to another, and, to a certain extent, understanding the natural way that we humans talk. Sutskever is a protege of Geoff Hinton, one of the founding fathers of the deep learning movement, who now works for Google.