Microsoft partners with Elon Musk-backed AI non-profit

On its own front, Microsoft has been keen to get more folks developing AI, enough to recently open-source the deep learning tools it used to build Skype Translate and Cortana for users to train their own AI. It's also opened its arms to other tech companies, partnering with Google, Amazon, IBM and Facebook in a coalition to trumpet the benefits of AI and agree on best practices. The initiative left out the Elon Musk and Peter Thiel-backed OpenAI, a research project dedicated to democratizing artificial intelligence. But today, the nonprofit announced a separate team-up with Microsoft to run large-scale experiments on the software giant's Azure cloud platform. Azure's open-sourced tools appealed to the nonprofit, as well as its computation-boosting Batch and machine learning capabilities, Microsoft said in a blog post.