Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI to develop AI technologies on Azure

Jul 28, 2019News

Microsoft today announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. In a blog post, Brockman said the investment will support the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI with the capacity to learn any intellectual task that a human can — with “widely distributed” economic benefits.

To this end, OpenAI intends to partner with Microsoft to jointly develop new AI technologies for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and will enter into an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft to “further extend” large-scale AI capabilities that “deliver on the promise of AGI.” Additionally, OpenAI will license some of its technologies to Microsoft, which will commercialize them and sell them to as-yet-unnamed partners, and OpenAI will train and run AI models on Azure as it works to develop new supercomputing hardware while “adhering to principles on ethics and trust.” The philosophy on AI Ethics is also initiated by Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation (MDI), which established Artificial Intelligence World Society (AIWS) for the purpose of promoting ethical norms and practices in the development and use of AI.

The original article can be found here