With $1 Billion From Microsoft, an A.I. Lab Wants to Mimic the Brain
By Cade Metz
July 22, 2019
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwibltHzrszjAhUBoZ4KHZaWBOIQFjADegQIABAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F07%2F22%2Ftechnology%2Fopen-ai-microsoft.html&usg=AOvVaw084zPzE_1iQkMika0ZsIrwSAN FRANCISCO — As the waitress approached the table, Sam Altman held up his phone. That made it easier to see the dollar amount typed into an investment contract he had spent the last 30 days negotiating with Microsoft.
“$1,000,000,000,†it read.
The investment from Microsoft, signed early this month and announced on Monday, signals a new direction for Mr. Altman’s research lab.
In March, Mr. Altman stepped down from his daily duties as the head of Y Combinator, the start-up “accelerator†that catapulted him into the Silicon Valley elite. Now, at 34, he is the chief executive of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab he helped create in 2015 with Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla.
Mr. Musk left the lab last year to concentrate on his own A.I. ambitions at Tesla. Since then, Mr. Altman has remade OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, into a for-profit company so it could more aggressively pursue financing. Now he has landed a marquee investor to help it chase an outrageously lofty goal.
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He and his team of researchers hope to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
A.G.I. still has a whiff of science fiction. But in their agreement, Microsoft and OpenAI discuss the possibility with the same matter-of-fact language they might apply to any other technology they hope to build, whether it’s a cloud-computing service or a new kind of robotic arm.
“My goal in running OpenAI is to successfully create broadly beneficial A.G.I.,†Mr. Altman said in a recent interview. “And this partnership is the most important milestone so far on that path.â€
In recent years, a small but fervent community of artificial intelligence researchers have set their sights on A.G.I., and they are backed by some of the wealthiest companies in the world. DeepMind, a top lab owned by Google’s parent company, says it is chasing the same goal.