Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the Microsoft campus last year, when the companies announced their partnership and a $1 billion investment in OpenAI by Microsoft. (Photo by Scott Eklund, Red Box Pictures, for Microsoft.)

Microsoft says it has created one of the world’s top supercomputers for the exclusive use of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company pursuing breakthroughs in artificial general intelligence, or AGI, new forms of autonomous technology that would match or surpass human abilities.

The companies say the Azure supercomputer will be used by OpenAI to train powerful new AI models, the process of wiring up the virtual brain of an autonomous system. Microsoft says the capabilities of the system allow it to process large amounts of data across many different areas, resulting in sophisticated models that go beyond traditional machine learning approaches focused on individual domains of knowledge.

“This is about being able to do a hundred exciting things in natural language processing at once and a hundred exciting things in computer vision, and when you start to see combinations of these perceptual domains, you’re going to have new applications that are hard to even imagine right now,” says Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technical officer, in a blog post from the company.

The ultimate goal is to use these new systems to solve major challenges in areas such as healthcare, climate and education. In one high-profile example, Microsoft has joined with Amazon and others in a White House initiative that seeks to use supercomputers, AI and the cloud to address the coronavirus outbreak.

OpenAI describes itself as “research laboratory discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.” CEO Sam Altman says the new supercomputer is the company’s “dream system.”

Microsoft made the announcement as part of its Build developer conference on Tuesday morning.  The company competes against Amazon, Google and others that offer AI capabilities as an extension of their cloud platforms. Although the supercomputer is for OpenAI’s exclusive use, the Redmond company is looking to further burnish its AI credentials in the eyes of corporate customers.

The company’s blog post calls it “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 announcement comes less than a year after Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and vowed to create a computational platform of “unprecedented scale” to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence.

The supercomputer, hosted in an undisclosed Microsoft Azure datacenter, has more than 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs, with 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server, according to the company. Microsoft didn’t provide the system’s benchmark processing speed, but said it would rank among the top 5 on the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

OpenAI was formed in 2016 by Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO; Altman, the former Y Combinator president; Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist; and Greg Brockman, the former Stripe CTO. Musk, who has sounded the alarm over the risks of AI, said last year that he was no longer involved in OpenAI.

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