Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI to create brain-like machines
The AI lab gets to throw Microsoft’s supercomputing and cloud computing muscle at its bid to build artificial general intelligence (AGI).
The news: Microsoft says OpenAI will help it jointly develop and train new AI technologies for its Azure cloud computing service. They’ll also work together on OpenAI’s mission to try to achieve AGI—machines with the capacity to learn tasks the way human beings do.
Show me the money: OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 with the mission of developing safe AGI. But AI models need mountains of data to crunch, and that requires expensive computing power. So earlier this year, OpenAI set up a new for-profit arm to help pay for its work.
Moonshot: Many AI researchers believe AGI is unachievable. OpenAI may try to reach it by scaling existing deep-learning approaches rather than by developing new ones. There’s no guarantee that will work, so Microsoft’s billion-dollar bet is a risky one.
