Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI becoming the preferred partner

Microsoft and OpenAI today announced a partnership, where Microsoft will invest $1 billion in OpenAI. Microsoft will become OpenAI’s preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies. Microsoft and OpenAI will jointly build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies. OpenAI will port its services to run on Microsoft Azure.

The goal is to accelerate breakthroughs in AI and power OpenAI’s efforts to create artificial general intelligence (AGI). Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a machine that can understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can.

Greg Brockman, Chairman & CTO at OpenAI, wrote that “AGI will be a system capable of mastering a field of study to the world-expert level, and mastering more fields than any one human – like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An AGI working on a problem would be able to see connections across disciplines that no human could. “