Researchers from Microsoft explained their machine learning model in a paper on preprint repository arXiv.

The model uses VIsual VOcabulary pre-training (VIVO) which leverages large amounts of paired image-tag data to learn a visual vocabulary.

A second dataset of properly captioned images is then used to help teach the AI how to best describe the pictures.

“Ideally, everyone would include alt text for all images in documents, on the web, in social media – as this enables people who are blind to access the content and participate in the conversation. But, alas, people don’t,” said Saqib Shaikh, a software engineering manager with Microsoft’s AI platform group.

Overall, the researchers expect the AI to deliver twice the performance of Microsoft’s existing captioning system.

In order to benchmark the performance of their new AI, the researchers entered it into the ‘nocaps’ challenge. As of writing, Microsoft’s AI now ranks first on its leaderboard.

“The nocaps challenge is really how are you able to describe those novel objects that you haven’t seen in your training data?” commented Lijuan Wang, a principal research manager in Microsoft’s research lab.

Developers wanting to get started with building apps using Microsoft’s auto-captioning AI can already do so as it’s available in Azure Cognitive Services’ Computer Vision package.

Microsoft’s impressive SeeingAI application – which uses computer vision to describe an individual’s surroundings for people suffering from vision loss – will be updated with features using the new AI.

“Image captioning is one of the core computer vision capabilities that can enable a broad range of services,” said Xuedong Huang, Microsoft CTO of Azure AI Cognitive Services.

“We’re taking this AI breakthrough to Azure as a platform to serve a broader set of customers,” Huang continued. “It is not just a breakthrough on the research; the time it took to turn that breakthrough into production on Azure is also a breakthrough.”

The improved auto-captioning feature is also expected to be available in Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint later this year.

(Photo by K8 on Unsplash)

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The supercomputer will deliver eye-watering amounts of power from its 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs (yes, it can probably even run Crysis.)

OpenAI is a non-profit that was founded by one Elon Musk to promote the ethical development of artificial intelligence technologies. Musk, however, departed OpenAI following disagreements over the company’s direction.

Back in February, Musk responded to an MIT Technology Review profile of OpenAI saying that it “should be more open,” and that all organisations “developing advanced AI should be regulated, including Tesla.”

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI last year and it seems we’re just beginning to see the fruits of that relationship. While most AIs today focus on doing single tasks well, the next wave of research is focusing on performing multiple at once.

“The exciting thing about these models is the breadth of things they’re going to enable,” said Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Kevin Scott.

“This is about being able to do a hundred exciting things in natural language processing at once and a hundred exciting things in computer vision, and when you start to see combinations of these perceptual domains, you’re going to have new applications that are hard to even imagine right now.”

So-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the ultimate goal for AI research; the point when a machine can understand or learn any task just like the human brain.

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” said Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI. “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.”

“We believe it’s crucial that AGI is deployed safely and securely and that its economic benefits are widely distributed. We are excited about how deeply Microsoft shares this vision.”

AGI will, of course, require tremendous amounts of processing power.

Microsoft and OpenAI claim their new supercomputer would rank in the top five but do not give any specific power measurements. To rank in the top five, a supercomputer would currently require more than 23,000 teraflops of performance. The current leader, the IBM Summit, reaches over 148,000 teraflops.

“As we’ve learned more and more about what we need and the different limits of all the components that make up a supercomputer, we were really able to say, ‘If we could design our dream system, what would it look like?’” said Altman. “And then Microsoft was able to build it.”

Unfortunately, for now at least, the supercomputer is built exclusively for OpenAI.

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If you’ve spent your life binging on sci-fi flicks and shows, today’s AI is far from the likes of HAL and Jarvis. For those kinds of experiences, AGI is needed.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said:

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. 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.

We believe it’s crucial that AGI is deployed safely and securely and that its economic benefits are widely distributed. We are excited about how deeply Microsoft shares this vision.”

Whereas AI is essentially pre-programmed to perform set tasks, the promise of AGI is to act more like a human brain. Indeed, this is where the excitement of assistants like the aforementioned turn into concerns of a Skynet-like AI as portrayed in Terminator.

Elon Musk founded OpenAI in part due to his concerns that AGI could pose an existential risk if developed carelessly. OpenAI most recently made headlines for developing essentially a fake news generator that, for obvious reasons, it deemed too dangerous to release.

Musk departed OpenAI in February last year over disagreement’s with the company’s development, but the San Francisco-based firm continues to pursue AGI.

Microsoft is clearly on-board with OpenAI’s mission. The $1 billion investment ensures Microsoft becomes OpenAI’s exclusive provider of cloud computing services to OpenAI, and the pair will build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, commented:

“AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time and 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 democratise AI — while always keeping AI safety front and centre — so everyone can benefit.”

Both companies promise developments will adhere to their ‘shared principles on ethics and trust,’ and will ‘create the foundation for advancements in AI to be implemented in a safe, secure, and trustworthy way’.

The goal of Microsoft and OpenAI is a lofty one that may not even be achieved in many of our lifetimes. In a recent survey of some leading experts in the field, the average estimate was there is a 50 percent chance AGI will be developed by 2099.

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