It may not spring to mind as the first place you would turn to develop the art of conversation, but an AI firm backed by Elon Musk is hoping Reddit will help it's machine learn to converse.

The OpenAI project is using a supercomputer known as a DGX-1 for its experiment, feeding popular Reddit threads to the AI for analysis, in the hope it will one day hold a conversation itself.

However, the project follows a similar idea from Microsoft - which has to pull its learning chatbot after it began posting racist and offensive messages after just hours.

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Using a supercomputer called DGX-1 (pictured), OpenAI, the non-profit artificial intelligence research firm backed by Elon Musk(right), is feeding popular Reddit threads to an algorithm that have a probabilistic understanding of dialogue with the hopes it will one day hold a conversation itself

HOW WILL DGX-1 LEARN? OpenAI will feed popular Reddit threads to algorithms that have a probabilistic understanding of dialogue with the hopes it will one day hold a conversation itself. By feeding Reddit threads to DGX-1, it will hopefully read and learn a range of conversations faster than any other system has done before it, as conversations are filled with natural human language and commonly used slang. OpenAI's researches are also exploring other methods for teaching its technology conversation such as interacting with humans and the real world. Advertisement

The machine was developed by chipmaker Nvidia, a firm that has taught robots to wash dirty dishes and is also working on technology that plays different computer games,according MIT Technology Review.

DGX-1 was designed with the sole purpose of deep learning, which will help AI researchers train other systems much faster with more data.

To understand the speed of this supercomputer, a conventional computer's computations take 250 hours compared to the 10 hours on the DGX-1.

Andrej Karpathy, a research scientist at OpenAI, says that modern machine-learning techniques tend to become smarter as they get larger.

'Deep learning is a very special class of models because as you scale up the models, they always work better,' Karpathy says in a video released by Nvidia today.

DGX-1 cost about $2 billion to develop and is essentially a bank of graphics chips designed that can process data at most billion arithmetic calculates per second and share data much easier than traditional systems.

Teaching artificial intelligence language is at the top of most researcher's lists and although they have hit a few bumps in the road, recent developments seem to be paving the way.

Researchers at Google, for example, fed a movie script to a deep-learning system that showed then showed it could answers questions 'remarkably well'.

And Facebook is feeding its AI users' posts to teach its chatbot how to hold relevant conversations in Messenger.

By feeding Reddit threads to DGX-1, the team hopes it will read and learn a range of conversations faster than any other system has done before it, as conversations on the news site are filled with natural human language and commonly used slang

By feeding Reddit threads to DGX-1, the team hopes it will read and learn a range of conversations faster than any other system has done before it, as conversations on the news site are filled with natural human language and commonly used slang.

OpenAI's researchers are also exploring other ways to teach AI language, such as through human and real world interactions.

Although in its early stages, this research will be easier to scale up following the current work with Reddit.

Karpathy says the models trained on Reddit data could go from consuming months of conversation to years thanks to the new hardware.

Other than teaching robots to talk, OpenAI has their sights set on developing algorithms that can learn from trial and error – a field of research known as reinforcement learning.

ELON MUSK'S AI FIRM: HOW DOES OPENAI WORK? Open AI is a collaborative non-profit artificial intelligence company set up at the send of last year by Elon Musk and president of start-up incubator Y Combinator, Sam Altman. It received more than $1 billion in funding when it launched and sees robotics, chatbots and games as practical fields where it develop and can flex its AI muscle. The firm set out its goals this week, which extend to using 'off the shelf' robots rather than building them from scratch, tweaking the robots to become mechanical maids. DGX-1 was designed with the sole purpose of deep learning, which will help AI researchers train other systems much faster with more data. To understand the speed of this supercomputer, a conventional computer's computations take 250 hours compared to the 10 hours on the DGX-1 'As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. 'Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. 'We'll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.' Advertisement

The non-profit hopes to use this method while teaching robots how to do household chores.

And others in the pipeline include AI algorithms capable of learning more efficiently by generating their own theories of what data means.

As of now, OpenAI is putting most of its efforts into teaching DGX-1 human conversation and to eventually think for itself - something Musk was very skeptical about last year.

DGX-1 cost about $2 billion to develop and is essentially a bank of graphics chips designed that can process data at most billion arithmetic calculates per second and share data much easier than traditional systems

THE RISE AND FALL OF TAY: HOW MICROSOFT'S CHATBOT TURNED EVIL OVERNIGHT Earlier this year, Microsoft launched its latest artificial intelligence (AI) bot named Tay. It is aimed at 18 to-24-year-olds and is designed to improve the firm's understanding of conversational language among young people online. Tay, like most teens, was found hanging out on popular social sites and will engage users with witty, playful conversation, the firm claims. However, within hours of it going live, Twitter users took advantage of flaws in Tay's algorithm that meant the AI chatbot responded to certain questions with racist answers. Online pranksters taught the lovable teen how to use racial slurs, defend white supremacist propaganda and support genocide. The bot also managed to spout gems such as, 'Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have got now.' And, 'donald trump is the only hope we've got', in addition to 'Repeat after me, Hitler did nothing wrong.' Followed by, 'Ted Cruz is the Cuban Hitler...that's what I've heard so many others say' Microsoft responded quickly to the situation, pulling the chatbot offline. But Tay did make one more appearance when it was accidentally turned on overnight 'as part of testing', but spammed its 213,000 followers with the same tweet and boasted about using drugs in front of police. Advertisement

Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in October, the billionaire entrepreneur linked the development of autonomous thinking machines to 'summoning the demon'.

Musk described artificial intelligence as our 'biggest existential threat'.

He said: 'I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence.

'If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence.'

'I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish.'

'With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.'