Microsoft Jumps on AI Bandwagon with $1B Investment

Call it FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. Microsoft, which has long been behind other major tech players in its investment in artificial intelligence, has vaulted into the AI realm by spending $1 billion for a piece of OpenAI.

The brainchild of Elon Musk, OpenAI in recent months shows advances in its programs for using neural networks to solve problems. The deal involves Microsoft becoming OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider while investing in supercomputing technologies that will provide access to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, according to an NBC.com story.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaks at a conference. (Credit: Wikimedia)

Co-founded by Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, OpenAI most recently sought investors to back some of its ambitious projects. According to theverge.com, OpenAI ‘has made outrageous promises about the potential of its technology,” adding:

“In order to restrain the greed of investors, OpenAI operates as a capped-profit entity, meaning anyone who puts in money can only expect returns 100 times their investment. That’s not offering “all future value” in the universe, but it’s not pocket change either. Exactly what terms Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed on with this $1 billion investment isn’t clear.”

Currently, OpenAI has excelled in playing board games, video games, deepfake photos and in analyzing medical scans, but doesn’t have true intelligence.

According to a story on PCmag.com, Altman believes the technology will expand its capabilities in the near future.

“The company points to the breakthroughs researchers have made in last decade in getting AI algorithms to recognize images, translate languages, and control robots. One of OpenAI’s own AI projects can write fiction like a human can (sort of).”