Microsoft and Elon Musk's OpenAI are teaming up to advance artificial intelligence

Microsoft has announced it will be partnering with the Elon Musk-backed OpenAI initiative in a bid to make "significant contributions to advance the field of AI". As part of its stated mission to'democratise AI', Microsoft will work closely with OpenAI in a joint effort to help ensure artificial intelligence is used to tackle some of the world's most challenging problems. The company outlined the new partnership in a blog post, where it also explained that OpenAI will use its Azure cloud platform, to help advance research and "create new tools and technologies that are only possible with the cloud". OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research organization co-founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever. The organisation will be using Microsoft's Azure N-Series Virtual Machines, which are designed to carry out intensive tasks such as deep learning, simulations, rendering and the training of neural networks.