Microsoft partners with Elon Musk-backed Open AI

Open AI, the non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research firm backed by Tesla Motors Inc's Elon Musk and other prominent tech executives, has signed an agreement to run most of its large-scale experiments on Microsoft Corp's flagship cloud service, Azure.

Microsoft announced that it is partnering with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman’s nonprofit, Open AI to advance the field of AI, "to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems."

Founded last December, Open AI is focused on developing AI that has long-term positive impacts on society.

Open AI will be using Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud-based operating system, as their primary cloud platform to power their research into deep learning and neural networks, as they run their large-scale artificial intelligence experiments in the cloud.

"Azure has impressed us by building hardware configurations optimized for deep learning — they offer K80 GPUs with InfiniBand interconnects at scale. We're also excited by their roadmap, which should soon bring Pascal GPUs onto their cloud." Open AI wrote in its blog post.

Altman, Co-chair of OpenAI, said in a recorded interview with Microsoft AI Research Group president Harry Shum, “Microsoft is the large tech company most aligned with us in terms of the goal of democratization to AI technology. This is our most important goal.”

"We are going to create a very important technology. That should belong to everyone in the world. We don’t want to see that concentrated in a single government, certainly not in a single company,” he further added.

Though Open AI is a non-profit, the deal would surely benefit Redmond company. Every company that relies on Azure becomes a paying customer of the company’s cloud services. Considering the massive research that will be undertaken by Open AI in Azure, Microsoft will be earning hefty amounts.

Using the platform, Microsoft also announced Azure Bot Service, "a first of its kind in the industry through which developers can accelerate the development of bots with the Microsoft Bot Framework and easily deploy and manage them in a serverless environment on Azure," the company said.