The AI Arms Race Heats Up

Artificial intelligence has been making its way into many practical business applications over the past several years, both in financial services and beyond. As such, the race to develop and/or acquire AI technology has become heated. In the latest salvo, Microsoft this week announced it would invest $1 billion in start-up OpenAI and form a  multi-year partnership. That’s a significant amount of money (though a drop in the bucket for the likes of MSFT). The tech giant also announced an investment in natural language processing firm Agolo this week.  

Regarding the OpenAI partnership, it will focus on developing “artificial general intelligence,” which means “the computing system can master a subject as well or better than the best humans in the world — and master more fields than any single human,” according to Reuters. Kind of exciting and terrifying at the same time.