Elon Musk’s OpenAI got a major financial boost after announcing that Microsoft Corp. is investing $1 billion USD to fund the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the purposes of expanding Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems.
AGI systems are said to be able to solve problems that are far beyond the capacity of current AI services.
“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,” read a press release from the two companies. “OpenAI and Microsoft’s vision is for artificial general intelligence to work with people to help solve currently intractable multidisciplinary problems, including global challenges such as climate change, more personalized healthcare and education.”
Beyond the collaboration aspect of this partnership, Azure will now be the sole cloud provider for OpenAI, and OpenAI will now be licensing some of its previous and future developments with Microsoft as its preferred commercialization partner.
OpenAI was co-founded by Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Sam Altman, who now serves as the company’s chief executive officer.