Understanding Microsoft's Investment in OpenAI

On July 22, Microsoft announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, a lab focused on "artificial general intelligence," or the goal of creating artificial intelligence with human-like observation and learning capabilities. With this announcement, Microsoft becomes the "exclusive" cloud computing provider for OpenAI and will have access to productizing OpenAI capabilities as they come to market. Key Takeaways: Microsoft makes a long-term investment in "general intelligence" to start on the next generation of AIs that will be coming to market in five-to-ten years and will be able to recoup some costs back as OpenAI's cloud provider and monetizer of OpenAI technologies. From a practical perspective, how does this affect Microsoft Azure Cloud Services and their current AI portfolio? First, OpenAI is still several years away from having any sort of launchable product. Its approach on imitating the human mind as an artificial intelligence approach is still far from mature.