The American IT giant Microsoft announced on Monday that it wants to invest $1 billion in OpenAI.
You’ve never heard of OpenAI? Well, you certainly know its founder, Elon Musk
Launched in 2015 with the support of several major technology players including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, OpenAI is a non-profit laboratory based in San Francisco dedicated to research on artificial intelligence. Recently, OpenAI created a for-profit related entity to attract more funding.
According to this partnership, Microsoft will become the sole cloud provider for OpenAI. In return, OpenAI will license Microsoft to commercialise part of its technology.
The two companies join forces for better and for worse
Both companies aim to go beyond specialised artificial intelligence. Indeed, the objective is to accelerate the development of general artificial intelligence – a version of artificial intelligence as flexible and generally intelligent as a human being.
According to Microsoft’s CEO, ‘By bringing together OpenAI’s breakthrough technology with new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, our ambition is to democratise AI – while always keeping AI safety front and centre – so everyone can benefit.’
Currently, OpenAI operates as a capped profit entity, which means that investors can only expect a return after the shares have reached 100 times their investment. In this case, how would Microsoft’s return on its $1 billion investment be capped?
Follow eXo Platform’s board Cartoon of the Week on Pinterest.
