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Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI
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High(4)High quality. Established institution or organization with editorial oversight and accountability.
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This 2019 announcement formalized OpenAI's commercialization strategy and Microsoft relationship, representing a pivotal moment in how safety-focused AI labs balance research funding with commercial partnerships and deployment considerations.
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Importance: 62/100blog postprimary source
Summary
In July 2019, Microsoft announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and a strategic partnership to develop AGI with widely distributed economic benefits. The partnership established Microsoft Azure as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider and committed both organizations to jointly developing AI supercomputing technologies. OpenAI would license pre-AGI technologies to Microsoft as its preferred commercialization partner.
Key Points
- •Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and became its exclusive cloud provider via Azure for scaling toward AGI.
- •OpenAI articulated AGI as a system capable of world-expert-level mastery across multiple fields, able to solve intractable multi-disciplinary problems.
- •The partnership model allows OpenAI to fund compute-intensive research by licensing pre-AGI technologies rather than building consumer products directly.
- •OpenAI framed beneficial AGI development as requiring massive capital and a unified software/AI research effort at unprecedented scale.
- •This deal marked a significant shift toward commercial partnerships as a funding strategy for safety-oriented AGI research organizations.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | Organization | 62.0 |
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Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI \| OpenAI
July 22, 2019
[Company](https://openai.com/news/company-announcements/)
# Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI
Illustration: Justin Jay Wang × DALL·E
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Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI to support us building artificial general intelligence (AGI) with widely distributed economic benefits. We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems.
Each year since 2012, the world has seen a new step function advance in AI capabilities. Though these advances are across very different fields like [vision(opens in a new window)](https://medium.com/coinmonks/paper-review-of-alexnet-caffenet-winner-in-ilsvrc-2012-image-classification-b93598314160) (2012), [simple video games(opens in a new window)](https://danieltakeshi.github.io/2016/12/01/going-deeper-into-reinforcement-learning-understanding-dqn/) (2013), [machine translation(opens in a new window)](https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/06/02/sequence-to-sequence-learning-with-neural-networks/) (2014), [complex board games(opens in a new window)](https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/) (2015), [speech synthesis(opens in a new window)](https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/) (2016), [image generation(opens in a new window)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G06dEcZ-QTg) (2017), [robotic control](https://openai.com/index/learning-dexterity/) (2018), and [writing text](https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/) (2019), they are all powered by the same approach: innovative applications of deep neural networks coupled with increasing [computational power](https://openai.com/index/ai-and-compute/). But still, AI system building today involves a lot of manual engineering for each well-defined task.
In contrast, an 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. We want AGI to work with people to solve currently intractable multi-disciplinary problems, including global challenges such as climate change, affordable and high-quality healthcare, and personalized education. We think its impact should be to give everyone economic freedom to pursue what they find most fulfi
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