Microsoft's ongoing partnership with San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research company OpenAI now includes a new exclusive license on the AI firm's groundbreaking GPT-3 language model, an auto-generating text program that's emerged as the most sophisticated of its kind in the industry. The two companies have been entwined for years through OpenAI's use of the Azure cloud computing platform, with Azure being how OpenAI accesses the vast computing resources it needs to train many of its models. Last year, Microsoft made a major $1 billion investment to become OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider, a deal that now involves being the exclusive licensee for GPT-3. OpenAI released GPT-3, the third iteration of its ever-growing language model, in July, and the program and its prior iterations have helped create some of the most fascinating AI language experiments to date. It's also inspired vigorous debate around the ethics of powerful AI programs that may be used for more nefarious purposes, with OpenAI initially refusing to publish research about the model for fear it would be misused.

Microsoft has built one of the top five publicly disclosed supercomputers in the world, making new infrastructure available in Azure to train extremely large artificial intelligence models, the company is announcing at its Build developers conference. Built in collaboration with and exclusively for OpenAI, the supercomputer hosted in Azure was designed specifically to train that company's AI models. It represents a key milestone in a partnership announced last year to jointly create new supercomputing technologies in Azure. It's also a first step toward making the next generation of very large AI models and the infrastructure needed to train them available as a platform for other organizations and developers to build upon. "The exciting thing about these models is the breadth of things they're going to enable," said Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Kevin Scott, who said the potential benefits extend far beyond narrow advances in one type of AI model.

Microsoft announced that it has "exclusively licensed" OpenAI's sophisticated GPT-3 language model that can generate disturbingly human-like text in applications ranging from commercial bots to creative writing. After investing $1 billion in the San Francisco startup last year to become OpenAI's exclusive cloud partner, Microsoft will get access to the language tech for itself and its Azure cloud customers. OpenAI released GPT-3 just a couple of months ago to a limited group of developers, but its capabilities have already generated massive amounts of buzz. It's the largest language model ever trained, and is capable of not just mundane tasks like auto-generating business correspondence, but also creative or technical chores like poetry, memes and computer code. In fact, the code is so powerful that OpenAI initially refused to publish research on the earlier GPT-2 model for fear it could be abused to write fake news.

The news: On September 22, Microsoft announced that it would begin exclusively licensing GPT-3, the world's largest language model, built by San Francisco–based OpenAI. The model acts like a powerful autocomplete: it can generate essays given the starting sentence, songs given a musical intro, or even web page layouts given a few lines of HTML code. Microsoft says it will begin making use of these capabilities in its products and services, though it didn't specify details. The companies say OpenAI will continue to offer its public-facing API, which allows chosen users to send text to GPT-3 or OpenAI's other models and receive its output. Only Microsoft, however, will have access to GPT-3's underlying code, allowing it to embed, repurpose, and modify the model as it pleases.

Microsoft is having a hell of a week. On Monday, the company announced a $7.5 billion deal to acquire Zenimax and all of its big video game properties. In one move, the Xbox platform's future suddenly looked a lot brighter. Today, Microsoft announced another deal that could also have a huge long-term impact in the coming years: It's acquired an exclusive license for OpenAI's GPT-3 language model. OpenAI has been making headlines for years--primarily due to the fact that AI-phobe Elon Musk was an early investor.

Microsoft today announced that it will exclusively license GPT-3, one of the most powerful language understanding models in the world, from AI startup OpenAI. In a blog post, Microsoft EVP Kevin Scott said that the new deal will allow Microsoft to leverage OpenAI's technical innovations to develop and deliver AI solutions for customers, as well as create new solutions that harness the power of natural language generation. "We see this as an incredible opportunity to expand our Azure-powered AI platform in a way that democratizes AI technology, enables new products, services and experiences, and increases the positive impact of AI at scale," Scott wrote. "The scope of commercial and creative potential that can be unlocked through the GPT-3 model is profound, with genuinely novel capabilities -- most of which we haven't even imagined yet. Directly aiding human creativity and ingenuity in areas like writing and composition, describing and summarizing large blocks of long-form data (including code), converting natural language to another language -- the possibilities are limited only by the ideas and scenarios that we bring to the table."

One of the most gratifying parts of my job at Microsoft is being able to witness and influence the intersection of technological progress and impact: harnessing the big trends in computing that have the opportunity to benefit everybody on the planet. Frank's post this morning from Ignite shows just how much progress is happening in many of these areas. Today, the foremost computing trend is undoubtedly artificial intelligence (AI). As we increasingly develop the ability to deploy huge AI models at scale in a way that can be leveraged by all developers and businesses, AI is becoming a platform – an environment upon which folks can build amazing new experiences, just like we've seen happen before with personal computers, mobile devices or the internet. Getting this AI platform off the ground requires unprecedented computing horsepower.

After they published the article, many responses came from different media houses and notable people trying to shed some light on what exactly happened. First, let's look at the legitimacy of the article. Surely it was the generated one but with no human intervention? So, it is just another media overhype? I mean cherry-picking the best and presenting it to you in a way that sells.

Since its release, GPT-3, OpenAI's massive language model, has been the topic of much discussion among developers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and journalists. Most of those discussions have been focused on the capabilities of the AI-powered text generator. But much about GPT-3 remains obscure. The company has opted to commercialize the deep learning model instead of making it freely available to the public. And though the AI has shown to be capable of many interesting feats, it's not yet clear if GPT-3 will become a real product or will join the endless array of abandoned projects that never found a viable business model. Earlier this month, as reported by users who have access to the beta version of the language model, OpenAI declared the initial pricing plan of GPT-3.

Trajectory data generation is an important domain that characterizes the generative process of mobility data. Traditional methods heavily rely on predefined heuristics and distributions and are weak in learning unknown mechanisms. Inspired by the success of deep generative neural networks for images and texts, a fast-developing research topic is deep generative models for trajectory data which can learn expressively explanatory models for sophisticated latent patterns. This is a nascent yet promising domain for many applications. We first propose novel deep generative models factorizing time-variant and time-invariant latent variables that characterize global and local semantics, respectively. We then develop new inference strategies based on variational inference and constrained optimization to encapsulate the spatiotemporal validity. New deep neural network architectures have been developed to implement the inference and generation models with newly-generalized latent variable priors. The proposed methods achieved significant improvements in quantitative and qualitative evaluations in extensive experiments.