OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Sam Altman, President of seed accelerator Y Combinator , to promote global AI research, rather than restricting it to individual companies. Altman is also CEO of OpenAI. According to the OpenAI Charter , the mission is to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of all humanity with what has been coined as ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI). Microsoft has now also joined the project , investing US$1 billion in its cooperation with the non-profit organization. This money will be used to create a new infrastructure for AI supercomputing on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure. OpenAI plans to transfer its AI services to Azure. These serve as a basis for the development of new AI technologies.

For OpenAI, the main advantage of its collaboration with Microsoft is the access to Azure’s vast computing power, while Microsoft stands to benefit from OpenAI’s know-how in robotics, for example, enabling it to offer its customers better AI services in the medium term.