Microsoft's new supercomputer will train AI to outperform humans

Microsoft has teamed up with a startup co-founded by Elon Musk to build one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, the company announced Tuesday during its annual Build developers conference -- held virtually this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. The startup is OpenAI, the charter of which underscores that it's working to ensure that AI which can outperform humans nevertheless benefits all of humanity. Microsoft stressed that this work represents a key milestone in a partnership announced last year to jointly create new supercomputing technologies in Azure. This is a first step, the computing giant explained, toward debuting large AI models "and the infrastructure needed to train them" as a platform that developers and other organizations can build on. "The exciting thing about these models is the breadth of things they're going to enable," said Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Kevin Scott in a company blog post about the news.