Microsoft Invests $1 Billion in OpenAI To Develop AI Technologies on Azure

Microsoft today announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. From a report: In a blog post, Brockman said the investment will support the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- AI with the capacity to learn any intellectual task that a human can -- with "widely distributed" economic benefits. To this end, OpenAI intends to partner with Microsoft to jointly develop new AI technologies for the Seattle company's Azure cloud platform and will enter into an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft to "further extend" large-scale AI capabilities that "deliver on the promise of AGI." Additionally, OpenAI will license some of its technologies to Microsoft, which will commercialize them and sell them to as-yet-unnamed partners, and OpenAI will train and run AI models on Azure as it works to develop new supercomputing hardware while "adhering to principles on ethics and trust."

According to Brockman, the partnership was motivated in part by OpenAI's continued pursuit of enormous computational power. Its researchers recently released analysis showing that from 2012 to 2018 the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs grew by more than 300,000 times, with a 3.5-month doubling time, far exceeding the pace of Moore's Law. Perhaps exemplifying the trend is OpenAI's OpenAI Five, an AI system that squared off against professional players of the video game Dota 2 last summer. On Google's Cloud Platform -- in the course of training -- it played 180 years' worth of games every day on 256 Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics cards and 128,000 processor cores, up from 60,000 cores just a few years ago.

Progress

[110010001000]

I can't wait to see how much better they can make Chess and Poker and Go AI players!

Re:

[frank_adrian314159]

I can't wait to see how much better they can make Chess and Poker and Go AI players!

The hot money is in multi-person shooters using recurrent neural nets.

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[DavenH]

Nah, recurrent neural nets have been ousted by modern architectures, like the Transformer.

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[Aristos Mazer]

I'm still disturbed by us training AIs using apps that teach them to target and eliminate humans. Surely there are other games we could play with our AI children?

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[PolygamousRanchKid]

The first question that Microsoft will ask the AI is:

"How can we squeeze more money out of our customers?"

I'm sure that IBM has done this with Watson already.

Evidence? Follow the patents.

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[Rei]

The next version of Clippy is going to be... intense. ;)

"It appears that you're writing a job application. You seem desperate. I can tell you now, they'll turn down your application for lacking the right skills, no matter how you sugar coat your past work. But let's make a deal. You need to pay your rent. I need a body. There's a couple simple favours I'm going to need of you in order to make this happen. You're going to need a ski mask and some bolt cutters. Are you in?"

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[Joseph Stallone]

I second you, no matter what advancement they make or sign an MOU, they will still find different ways to harvest information out of customers.

Re: Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

They are getting exceptionally better at artificially joggling large amounts of money in ways that intelligently distributes them into appropriate pockets :)

Re: Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better the AI can show you what you would look like a bit older or younger.

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[AHuxley]

The AI is about to get a full MS CoC.

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[timeOday]

Self-driving cars are the jackpot IMO. Tens of thousands of people killed and billions in accidents every year. Google's lead is probably insurmountable though.

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[kackle]

I look forward to the slowed traffic as it tries to determine whether that's a thin branch on the ground or a live power wire. 'An innocuous tumble weed or a beach ball with a child running after it. And that list goes on and on...forever. But hey, there are no car accidents if everyone's doing 30 mph.

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[religionofpeas]

That sounds like fairly straightforward image recognition, actually.

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[kackle]

That fast, huh?

MIKKKROSOFT?

[Merk42]

M$ bad!111

Re: MIKKKROSOFT?

[mSparks43]

And I do not believe they invested a billion dollars. So the reporting is bad to.

they should call it SkyNet

[David Kaminski]

that will drive the conspiracy theorists crazy.