Tag Archives: artificial intelligence (AI)

Tech

Microsoft partners with OpenAI to develop artificial general intelligence

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Image by Efes Kitap from Pixabay

Tech giant Microsoft recently committed a US$1 billion investment into OpenAI, a San Francisco-based research lab founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, becoming the company’s exclusive cloud provider as they work to build new Azure artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputing technology.

Under the terms of the deal, which was announced on 22 July, Microsoft will also serve as OpenAI’s preferred partner to commercialise its inventions.

Through the partnership, the two companies hope to further extend Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems, accelerate breakthroughs in AI and power OpenAI’s efforts to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI is typically understood to mean he intelligence of a machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. In short, it’s the type of AI that we’re used to seeing in science-fiction movies; a computer with a consciousness that can think and feel in the same way as a flesh and blood human.

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service intended for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centres.

The agreement will see Microsoft and OpenAI focus on building a new computational platform within Azure that will “rain and run increasingly advanced AI models”, include hardware that builds on Microsoft’s supercomputing technology.

The companies hope that the results will “create the foundation for advancements in AI to be implemented in a safe, secure and trustworthy way and is a critical reason the companies chose to partner together”.

Advancements in the application of deep neural networks coupled with increasing computational power have led to AI-focused breakthroughs in vision, speech, language processing, translation, robotic control and gaming.

These systems work well for the specific problem they’ve been trained to solve but getting AI to address more complex problems that the world faces today – such as climate change – will require “generalization and deep mastery of multiple AI technologies”, Microsoft said.

OpenAI and Microsoft’s vision is for AGI to work with people to help solve currently intractable multidisciplinary problems.

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement. “Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI.”

OpenAI believes that it is “crucial” that any such AI should be used “safely and securely”, and that the economic benefits should be “widely distributed”, Altman added.

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, described AI as “one of the most transformative technologies of our time”, which he believes has “the potential to help solve many of our world’s most pressing challenges”.

“By bringing together OpenAI’s breakthrough technology with new Azure AI supercomputing technologies, our ambition is to democratize AI — while always keeping AI safety front and center — so everyone can benefit,” he said.

Altman started OpenAI in 2015 with Elon Musk, although the latter is no longer involved in the business. It currently operates as a capped-profit entity, from which investors can only expect up to 100x in returns, but it unclear what the terms of the Microsoft investment will be other than making it an exclusive provider of cloud services to OpenAI and working together on new technologies.

HoloLens inventor and Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman tweeted that he was very excited about this new partnership, which suggests that we might possibly be seeing some mixed reality AI crossovers later on down the line.

Tech

Poll: World Economic Forum finds widespread public concern about AI

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An opinion poll commissioned by the World Economic Forum found that “a sizable proportion of the global public believes greater oversight is needed of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by governments and businesses”, the non-profit said on 1 July.

According to the poll – which surveyed the attitudes of more than 20,000 people across 27 countries – 41 percent of respondents said that they were worried about the use of AI, compare to a further 27 percent who disagreed and 32 percent who said that they were undecided.

When asked whether they believed that the use of AI by companies should be more strictly regulated than it is today, 48 percent of respondents said that they agreed, compared with 20 percent who disagreed.

Respondents’ scepticism concerning corporate use of AI was diminished when asked about governments with fewer people – 40 percent of respondents – believing that restrictions needed to be tightened, compared with 24 percent who said that they disagreed with the statement.

However, only 19 percent of respondents said that they believed that the use of AI should be banned altogether, compared to 48 percent who disagreed, supporting the idea that society does still overwhelmingly believe in the inherent potential of the burgeoning technology to do good.

The poll found that attitudes towards AI were relatively uniform across sex, age, income or education level. For example, slightly fewer men – 39 percent – said that they were concerned about the use of AI than women – 44 percent.

Similarly, respondents under the age of 35 were only slightly less likely than those aged 35-49, and those 50 and older, to agree with calls to further restrict the use of AI by government and for more regulation of business.

People with lower levels of education were just as concerned about the use of AI in general (42% compared to 41% for both medium- and highly-educated people), in favour of restricting government use (41% vs. 40% and 39%, respectively), and in favour of regulating business (48% vs. 49% and 49%, respectively).

The data was compiled by Ipsos for the Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions, which brought together over 1,800 leaders this in the Chinese city of Dalian this year to discuss among other things the impact of technological innovation on the global economy and society.

“Artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful tools we have as a society,” Kay Firth-Butterfield, Head of Artificial Intelligence and the World Economic Forum, said in a statement. “But, without a governance structure to provide the guardrails for how we interact with this, we risk leaving large parts of the population behind.”

“Developing these guidelines is our focus area at the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” she added. “We hope to accelerate the adoption of this technology to maximize its benefits, while minimizing the risks.”

Tech

Microsoft plans new “sustainable” data centers in Sweden

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American multinational technology company Microsoft had announced that it is planning to build two new data centers in the Swedish cities of Gävle and Sandviken, just north of Stockholm, that will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources . It is also aiming for the two centers to achieve zero-waste operations.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said that, by the end of this year, the company intends to be powering its datacenters with 60 percent renewable energy, and will aim to reach 70 percent renewable energy by 2023, on the path to 100 percent. The company has operated as carbon neutral since 2012 and “is continuously increasing the amount of energy the company uses from renewable sources – wind, solar, and hydropower”.

It plans to collaborate with Vattenfall –  a state-owned Swedish power company that also generates power in Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom – on the sourcing and supply of renewable energy for the two planned datacenters.

The two companies said they planned to collaborate to develop solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of the datacenters and construct new power infrastructure to provide stable power for the facilities and the surrounding areas in Sweden in the coming years”. They anticipate that, over time, the new power infrastructure will help further reduce the carbon footprint of the datacenters.

Microsoft and Vattenfall previously announced “the largest wind energy deal in the Netherlands in 2017”, in which Microsoft purchased 100 percent of the wind energy generated from a 180-megawatt wind farm adjacent to its local datacenter operations in the Netherlands. The wind farm is being constructed and operated by Vattenfall in the Wieringermeer Polder, north of Amsterdam.

“We intend for our datacenters in Sweden to be among the most sustainably designed and operated in the world with the ultimate ambition of achieving zero-carbon operations,” Noelle Walsh, CVP of Cloud Operations & Innovation at Microsoft Corp, said in a statement. “The datacenter design we’re developing will further Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to transition to a sustainable, low-carbon future.”

Vattenfall’s Senior Vice President of Strategic Development, Andreas Regnell, said the company was “fully committed” to help its customers to live “fossil fee” within one generation and that the partnership with Microsoft would fit “very well” with Vattenfall’s overall strategy.

The new datacenters in Sweden are “in anticipation of future needs for cloud and internet services as demand in Europe continues to grow”, Microsoft said. In its recent Q3 2019 earnings report, Microsoft told investors that demand for its cloud offerings drove commercial cloud revenue to $9.6 billion in its most recent quarter, up 41 percent year-over-year.

The datacentres in Sweden will add to the company’s existing European datacentre footprint, joining the ranks of its other planned datacentres in Norway and Switzerland, and already available datacentres in Austria, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

As part of a drive to focus on research and development for greater efficiency and increased renewable energy across its global infrastructure, Microsoft said it plans to launch a new data-driven circular cloud initiative using the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor performance and “streamline the reuse, resale and recycling of datacentre assets, including servers”.