After stepping down as the head of the startup accelerator Y Combinator in March, Sam Altman has remade OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, into a for-profit company so it could more aggressively pursue financing.

Now he has landed a marquee investor to help it chase an outrageously lofty goal. But take all this with a grain of salt.

Microsoft will deliver the $1 billion over the course of several years. In all likelihood, that is neither enough money nor enough time to produce AGI, something that most experts believe is unlikely to arrive for decades or even centuries, if it arrives at all.

OpenAI will build narrower forms of A.I. in the meantime, like systems that aim to understand natural language: nytimes.com/2018/11/18/techn…

With the deal, both OpenAI and Microsoft are looking for a little PR.

OpenAI needs computing power to fulfill its ambitions, but it must also attract the world’s leading researchers, which is hard to do in today’s market for talent. Microsoft is competing with Google and Amazon in cloud computing, where A.I. capabilities are increasingly important.

Open AI does not sell any products or seem to have plans for selling products. But Microsoft is investing money that will largely be pumped back into its own company, as OpenAI buys computing power from the tech giant.

Under the terms of the contract, Microsoft will eventually become the sole cloud computing provider for Open AI, and most of that $1 billion will be spent on computing power, Altman says.

@gdb’s comment on HN here (news.ycombinator.com/item?id…) indicates that it’s a cash investment. Is that not the impression you got?

It is. But the money will be doled out over an unspecified time period. And he made it very clear that most of the money will be spent on computing power (that means it will be spent on Microsoft)