Microsoft and OpenAI partner to develop artificial general intelligence

Microsoft and OpenAI have announced a multiyear partnership ‘to accelerate breakthroughs in AI’ and empower ‘efforts to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)’. OpenAI describes AGI as ‘a system capable of mastering a field of study to the world-expert level, and mastering more fields that any one human’. Microsoft will invest USD1 billion in OpenAI’s efforts to build such an AGI ‘with widely distributed economic benefits’. The two companies will also work together on building new supercomputing technologies for Microsoft’s Azure AI platform, as a ‘foundation for advancements in AI to be implemented in a safe, secure and trustworthy way’.