Microsoft has announced it was investing $1 billion in OpenAI to “support 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. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems. – Open AI
Publishing the announcement on its official blog, OpenAI explained how the new partnership is going to work: AI system building today involves a lot of manual engineering for each well-defined task.
In contrast, an AGI will be a system capable of mastering a field of study to the world-expert level, & mastering more fields than any one human. An AGI working on a problem would be able to see connections across disciplines that no human could.
OpenAI is producing a sequence of increasingly powerful AI technologies, which requires a lot of capital for computational power. For its pre-AGI tech, it has chosen Microsoft as its “preferred partner” for licencing.
Image Credit: OpenAI
