Microsoft announced today it is partnering with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman’s nonprofit, Open AI, an organization designed to promote artificial intelligence that helps rather than hurts humanity. The entrepreneurs started it in 2015 with a $1 billion in investment.
Elon Musk’s nonprofit is working with Microsoft to help make sure robots don’t take over the world
Open AI will use thousands of Microsoft’s virtual machines.
Asa Mathat
Open AI will now use Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud-based operating system, to power their research into deep learning and neural networks, as they run their large-scale artificial intelligence experiments in the cloud. Open AI plans to use “thousands to tens of thousands” of Microsoft’s virtual machines, the nonprofit wrote in a blogpost today.
Microsoft Azure supports open source technologies, which is a crucial part of Open AI’s mission. Altman has described his nonprofit’s commitment to open source as a way of protecting against the possibility of centralized, monopoly power over artificial intelligence, which he says has the power to harm humanity if used irresponsibly.
Elon Musk has spoken extensively on his fear that artifical intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes” and has described the search for artifical intelligence as “summoning the demon.”
Watch Elon Musk talk about how he believes there’s an overwhelming possibility that we live in a simulation.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
