Microsoft announces multibillion investment in OpenAI
The tech giant will build specialised supercomputers to grow OpenAI's independent AI research as part of the new agreement
Microsoft has announced a "multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment" in San Francisco-based AI firm OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
On Monday, the tech titan touted its new agreement as the third stage of a growing alliance with OpenAI.
According to Microsoft, the partnership would help both firms commercialise cutting-edge technology and speed up AI advances.
Microsoft has not disclosed the amount of money it is investing in OpenAI, but a Bloomberg report claimed that Microsoft would invest $10 billion over several years.
Microsoft made its first investment in OpenAI in 2019, with a second tranche in 2021.
"We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratise AI as a new technology platform," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a blog post.
"In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications," he added.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, described the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft during the last three years as a "great" development.
"Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone," Altman noted.
As part of the new agreement, Microsoft will build specialised supercomputers to grow OpenAI's independent AI research. Engineers and computer architects will benefit from this when they test and deploy new features on products such as ChatGPT and DALL-E2.
One important aspect of the agreement is that Microsoft will be OpenAI's sole cloud provider, and that all OpenAI workloads spanning products, API services, and research will be powered by Microsoft's cloud services.
Microsoft also intends to use OpenAI's models in a number of its consumer and business offerings.
The company is said to be getting ready to compete with Google by integrating ChatGPT into Bing search results.
Additionally, there are rumours that Microsoft is considering adding some language AI technology to its Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook applications.
When it first began operations in December 2015, OpenAI was a non-profit AI research organisation that aimed to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who served as the co-chair, was one of its early investors.
But that changed in 2018 when it established Open AI LP. as a for-profit company and transferred almost all of its staff there.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in July 2019, making it the exclusive supplier of cloud computing services to OpenAI.
AI experts consider OpenAI to be one of the top three AI labs in the world.
The firm has created game-playing AI software that can outperform humans in video games like Dota 2. However, it has drawn more attention for its amusing AI picture generator DALL-E and its AI text generator GPT-3.
It will be interesting to watch how Microsoft incorporates ChatGPT features into its goods and services, especially after the massive job cuts that the company says will occur over the next three months.