Microsoft is to invest $1 billion in OpenAI co-founded by Elon Musk in a partnership intended to develop Azure AI technology for supercomputers.
The deal with Microsoft involves cooperation on three points: First, the joint work on the development of “Azure AI supercomputing technologies”; second, OpenAI has pledged to port its existing services to run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud; and third, Microsoft will become OpenAI’s ‘preferred partner’ for commercializing its AI developments.
Sam Alton, a co-founder of OpenAI claimed that “the creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, meanwhile, described AI as “one of the most transformative technologies of our time” with “the potential to help solve many of our world’s most pressing challenges”.
Musk claimed that the idea of OpenAI, when it was founded, was to develop AI technologies that would be deployed for good, rather than harm, by distributing AI technologies as widely as possible.
Back in November 2016, the organisation struck a deal with Microsoft to focus on “making significant contributions to advance the field of AI, while also furthering our mutual goal of using AI to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems”.