Microsoft is to invest $1B in OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk.

With the aim of creating an “artificial general intelligence,” which can learn to perform a range of tasks currently conducted by humans, Microsoft is determined to invest $1B in OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk.

The two companies, Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI, have partnered to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-scale AI systems. Through this partnership, the companies will accelerate breakthroughs in AI and power OpenAI’s efforts to create artificial general intelligence (AGI). The resulting enhancements to the Azure platform will also help developers build the next generation of AI applications. The partnership covers the following:

• Microsoft and OpenAI will jointly build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies
• OpenAI will port its services to run on Microsoft Azure, which it will use to create new AI technologies and deliver on the promise of artificial general intelligence
• Microsoft will become OpenAI’s preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies

The two warehouses will be located in the north of the state, in Akron and Rossford, respectively. They’ll function much like Amazon’s other shipping centers, providing a collaborative workspace between human employees and the company’s growing army of shipping robots.

OpenAI’s stated mission is to develop “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. In layman’s terms, AGI is AI that can think like a human (possibly even better) while carrying out complex tasks autonomously. Whether or not an AGI would immediately decide to incinerate humanity a la Skynet remains to be seen, but OpenAI at least claims its artificial intelligence would be safe and beneficial for the human race.

According to Mashable, so far, one of OpenAI’s most famous accomplishments is beating humans at competitive video games.