Microsoft announced that it's investing $1 billion in the Elon Musk-founded company OpenAI. The two companies will be partnering to bring AI and supercomputing technologies to Microsoft Azure, and that OpenAI will exclusively run its services in Microsoft's cloud.
As part of the recently announced partnership, Microsoft and OpenAI will embark on an "exclusive multi-year computing partnership" to create "a system capable of mastering a field of study to the world-expert level and mastering more fields than any one human."
To put it simply, Microsoft will attempt to come up with ways of commercializing the technologies and monetize them with extended partnerships. The company hopes that the partnership will benefit the developers who use cloud-based infrastructure for web platforms and applications.
In 2016, OpenAI announced it will be using Azure solely as its cloud provider. Microsoft reaffirmed this and said, "OpenAI will port its services to run on Microsoft Azure," which seems to be an extension of OpenAI's previous Azure commitment.
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit company four years ago in San Francisco, California. As of writing, the company employs 100 people and aims for humanity to experience the full benefits of AI.
The company's founders are Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. Microsoft's biggest Azure rival, Amazon AWS, also was one of the early backers of OpenAI.
OpenAI made the news recently for developing AI that has the ability to beat human gamers. Among its other experiments include improving the dexterity of robotic hands and writing believable fake news.
Musk has since left OpenAI, which he co-founded due to his concerns that AI could pose. The company has continued its efforts of advancing some of the most outstanding ideas the world has ever seen, like stitching sensors into the brains of humans. The company, in a press release, said that its new technology would hopefully address several issues the world is currently facing, such as personalized education, high-quality healthcare that's affordable, and climate change.
LinkedIn co-founder and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman has been a board member for OpenAI from the time it was conceived. In fact, Hoffman's non-profit organization is one of the company's investors.
OpenAI has had several notable accomplishments, including a robot for household chores; releasing a software platform called Universe, which measures and trains AI intelligence in websites, games, and other applications; and OpenAI Gym, a research platform for reinforcement0-learning. The company is also behind the MuseNet deep neural network, which can produce musical compositions and other projects.
