Microsoft confirmed on Monday that it is investing “multibillions of dollars” in OpenAI, the company behind the popular new AI chatbot tool ChatGPT.
Microsoft, an early investor in OpenAI, has announced plans to expand its existing partnership with the company as part of a larger effort to add more artificial intelligence to its product suite. OpenAI stated in a separate blog post that the multi-year investment will be used to “create AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.”
Microsoft Investment
“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, said in a statement.
OpenAI collaborates closely with Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in July 2019, making Microsoft the “exclusive” provider of cloud computing services to OpenAI. Microsoft announced on Monday that Azure will continue to be the sole provider of OpenAI.
According to the release, Microsoft’s investment will also enable the two companies to engage in large-scale supercomputing and develop new AI-powered experiences.
The investment could also propel Microsoft to the forefront of artificial intelligence, paving the way for the company to incorporate ChatGPT into some of its flagship applications, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
Microsoft recently announced that it would soon add ChatGPT features to its cloud computing service, Azure, as a result of its existing exclusive deal with OpenAI. Businesses could use the tools directly within their apps and services if ChatGPT becomes available on that service.
OpenAI is ranked as one of the top three AI labs in the world by AI researchers, and the company has developed game-playing AI software that can outperform humans in video games such as Dota 2. However, its AI text generator GPT-3 and its quirky AI image generator Dall-E have arguably received more attention.
ChatGPT generates text automatically based on written prompts in a far more advanced and creative manner than previous Silicon Valley chatbots. The software was released in late November and quickly became a viral sensation, with tech executives and venture capitalists gushing about it on Twitter, even comparing it to Apple’s iPhone debut in 2007.
The technology has also piqued the interest of Google executives, who stated at a recent all-hands meeting that while Google has similar AI capabilities, its reputation may suffer if it moves too quickly on AI chat technology.
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A Bet On Future Of AI
Since OpenAI made ChatGPT available in late November, it has been used to write articles for at least one news publication, write lyrics in the style of various artists (one of whom later responded, “this song sucks,” and draft research paper abstracts that fooled some scientists.
Some CEOs have already used the platform to send emails or perform accounting tasks.
OpenAI is also the company behind DALL-E, which generates an apparently infinite number of images in response to user prompts. To generate content, both DALL-E and ChatGPT are trained on massive amounts of data.
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