OpenAI's $100 Million Startup Fund Will Make 'Big Early Bets' With Microsoft As Partner

OpenAI is launching a $100 million startup fund, which it calls the OpenAI Startup Fund, through which it and its partners will invest in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems (and productivity). Among those partners and investors in the fund is Microsoft, at whose Build conference OpenAI founder Sam Altman announced the news. TechCrunch reports: In a prerecorded video, Altman explained that "this is not a typical corporate venture fund. We plan to make big early bets on a relatively small number of companies, probably not more than 10." It's not clear exactly how the $100 million will be divided or disbursed, or on what timeline, or whether this is part of a longer program. But it seems to be a limited fund, not just the 2021 round.

Altman did say that they will be looking for companies that are taking on serious issues, like healthcare, climate change and education, where AI-powered applications or approaches could "benefit all of humanity," in keeping with OpenAI's mission statement. But it would also consider productivity improvements as well, presumably like the GPT-3-powered natural language coding Microsoft showed off yesterday. Companies selected for funding will receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft, which hopefully would allow them to spring fully formed and ready to scale from the program. OpenAI would not elaborate on the equity agreement, expectations for startups, other partners or any further details. It's entirely possible that the $100 million figure is the only thing they've actually settled on.

At least you caught up with the AI hype already

[thesjaakspoiler]

... I'm still trying to read up on the blockchain hype....=/

For good of all mankind.

[Ostracus]

Altman did say that they will be looking for companies that are taking on serious issues, like healthcare, climate change and education, where AI-powered applications or approaches could "benefit all of humanity," in keeping with OpenAI's mission statement.

Slashdot article selection and comment moderation.

Re:

[TomGreenhaw]

I think Azure Cognitive Services is a lot easier and cheaper to implement than Watson.

"Open" AI

[systemd-anonymousd]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish fits hand in hand with "name your project 'Open,' get popular, then close it." GPT-3 could run, scaled-down, on Titans and 3090s, just like GPT-2, but this time they're keeping it behind a paywalled API and making developers beg for the chance to have OpenAI police their API calls and take their money.

Re:

[RimkeAnolina]

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Microsoft Marketing Ploy

[CaptQuark]

Team up with a "partner" company. Announce a $100 million Start Up fund for projects that just happen to require Azure to run. Bring in $2 billion in new sales of Azure accounts, required ancillary software, server licenses, support contracts, etc.

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Azure Cognitive Services are worth a look

[TomGreenhaw]

If you are coding in Visual Studio, they are an easy to use and cost effective way to do a lot of things like speech recognition, content filtering, image recognition at scale without risking a lot of up front cost.

$100M worth of booze cocaine and hookers

[Rick Schumann]

So-called 'AI' is crap, this clearly is just a way to get free money from fools so massive parties can be thrown.