Microsoft continues to seek partnerships with startup companies that are working on AI models and services. The latest such effort was announced today with Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI revealing its new agreement with Microsoft.
in a press release, Microsoft and Sanctuary AI stated this new partnership is specifically for making an AI model that can work for humanoid-like general-purpose robots.
Launched in 2018, Sanctuary AI has been developing its Phoenix robots that use its Carbon AI control system. The company just announced the seventh generation of its Phoenix robots last week. The Carbon AI is supposed to allow these robots to do complex tasks on their own. This new partnership will allow Sanctuary AI to use Microsoft"s Azure cloud services for "training, inference, networking, and storage."
Ashley Llorens, the Corporate Vice President and Managing Director of Microsoft Research, is quoted in the press release as saying:
We"re excited to be working with Sanctuary AI to accelerate AI model innovation and embodied AI research in areas like reasoning, planning, and human-agent collaboration, Through our collaboration, Sanctuary AI will have access to Microsoft Azure infrastructure and services as they explore the future of general-purpose robots that can assist across various use cases and industries.
There"s no word on the specific financial agreements between Microsoft and Sanctuary AI.
Microsoft continues to be a major, but not majority, investor in OpenAI, where it has used its GPT text prompt AI model and its DALL-E image model in many of its products. Recent rumors claim that the two companies are working on an AI super computer project with the code name Stargate.
More recently, Microsoft announced a partnership with France-based Mistral AI. Microsoft"s Azure AI customers can now access Mistral AI"s own LLMs on Microsoft"s cloud servers. A minor, but unknown, financial investment in Mistral AI was also reportedly made by Microsoft.