Microsoft invests $1bn in OpenAI to develop AI technologies for supercomputers

Non-profit co-founded by Elon Musk secures another $1bn in investment, this time from Microsoft

Microsoft is to invest $1 billion in OpenAI in a partnership intended, the software giant claims, to develop AI technology for supercomputers.

OpenAI is a non-profit foundation co-founded by Elon Musk - who left the board of the company in early 2018.

The deal with Microsoft involves cooperation on three points: First, and possibly more important, 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 commercialising its AI developments. It's not clear where that leaves AWS.

The partnership will also help OpenAI to develop what it has described as "artificial general intelligence" (AGI).

"The companies will focus on building a computational platform in Azure of unprecedented scale, which will train and run increasingly advanced AI models, include hardware technologies that build on Microsoft's supercomputing technology, and adhere to the two companies' shared principles on ethics and trust," the announcement continues.

Sam Alton, a co-founder of OpenAI and now CEO, 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".

He continued: "By bringing together OpenAI's breakthrough technology with new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, our ambition is to democratize AI - while always keeping AI safety front and centre - so everyone can benefit."

OpenAI is a non-profit organisation co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015, with funding from Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston, among others. It also has corporate ties to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IT services firm Infosys.

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. Not everyone is convinced that Musk's approach will turn out to be the right one, however.

Its developments so far, though, are a long way from the kind of AI seen in sci-fi. They include a team of OpenAI bots capable of playing a mean, but by no means unbeatable, game of Dota 2 and RoboSumo, a virtual humanoid ‘meta learning' robot.

It's not the first deal that OpenAI has struck with Microsoft. 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".