Microsoft and OpenAI Partnership for AGI Development

Microsoft has invested $1 billion in OpenAI to accelerate the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) with widely distributed economic benefits. This partnership establishes Microsoft Azure as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider and focuses on the joint development of new Azure AI supercomputing technologies to create a platform capable of scaling to AGI.

Strategic Infrastructure and Commercialization

Microsoft Azure will serve as the foundational hardware and software platform for OpenAI's research. The partnership aims to extend Azure's capabilities in large-scale AI systems through the joint development of supercomputing technologies.

To fund the massive computational requirements of producing increasingly powerful AI technologies without shifting its primary focus toward product development, OpenAI will license its pre-AGI technologies. Microsoft is the preferred partner for the commercialization of these licensed technologies.

Defining Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

OpenAI defines AGI as a system capable of mastering a field of study to a world-expert level and mastering more fields than any single human. Unlike current AI systems, which require manual engineering for specific, well-defined tasks, an AGI would be able to identify connections across disciplines that are invisible to humans.

OpenAI intends for AGI to be used as a tool to solve intractable multi-disciplinary global challenges, specifically:

  • Climate change
  • Affordable and high-quality healthcare
  • Personalized education

The Path to Beneficial AGI

Building AGI requires a unified effort across software engineering and AI research on a massive computational scale. OpenAI asserts that technical success alone is insufficient; the deployment of AGI must be handled safely and securely to ensure the trajectory of humanity is positively shaped.

Key priorities for the successful realization of beneficial AGI include:

  • Ensuring safe and secure deployment.
  • Preparing society for the implications of AGI.
  • Ensuring the economic upside is widely shared to provide individuals with the economic freedom to pursue fulfilling activities.

Context of AI Advancement

OpenAI notes that since 2012, AI has seen annual "step function" advances powered by deep neural networks and increasing computational power. These milestones include:

  • 2012: Vision
  • 2013: Simple video games
  • 2014: Machine translation
  • 2015: Complex board games
  • 2016: Speech synthesis
  • 2017: Image generation
  • 2018: Robotic control
  • 2019: Writing text

Sources