Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based research lab founded by Silicon Valley's famous, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, "to support us building artificial general intelligence (AGI) with widely distributed economic benefits."
"We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI," continued the announcement by OpenAI.
And here, the companies are working together to develop the next generation of Azure AI supercomputing technologies, with Microsoft becoming OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider.
The term 'AGI' is for autonomous computers that can see the world and solve tasks the same way humans do.
As opposed to Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) that can only do one narrow task, AGI is regarded as a 'Strong AI'. It has the capability to perform any intellectual task that a human being can, defining the distinction between simulating a mind and actually having a mind.
Read: Paving The Roads To Artificial Intelligence: It's Either Us, Or Them
OpenAI has famously leveraged its technology to annihilate gamers, use large-scale unsupervised language model to generate coherent paragraphs of text and more.
With the two companies partnering together, “The companies will focus on building a computational platform in Azure of unprecedented scale, which will train and run increasingly advanced AI models, include hardware technologies that build on Microsoft’s supercomputing technology," Microsoft wrote in a press release.
“Modern AI systems work well for the specific problem on which they’ve been trained, but getting AI systems to help address some of the hardest problems facing the world today will require generalization and deep mastery of multiple AI technologies,” it continued.
In a statement in by Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft said said the partnership would keep “AI safety front and center” so that “everyone can benefit.”
OpenAI began as a non-profit research lab in 2015, and was intended to explore the fields of AI with the help of tech companies like Google and Amazon, while focusing on developing its own AIs in a safe and democratic fashion.
But earlier this 2019, OpenAI said that it needed more money to continue its work. This is why it set up a another for-profit firm to seek outside investment.
To attract investors, OpenAI has made numerous promises about the potential of its technology. Altman, who became CEO of the for-profit OpenAI, said that if the lab does manage to create AGI, it could "maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.”
Also to attract investors, the for-profit OpenAI operates as a capped-profit entity, which means that anyone wiling to invest money can only expect returns 100 times their investment.
Altman is confident about the future of AI, the holy grail of the field of AI for decades.
"The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” said Altman. "Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI."
Among other things, the two companies hope this technology can help solve challenges like climate change, education, and healthcare.