Microsoft has gone from being an early investor in the start-up OpenAI to investing another $10 billion in the company. OpenAI is the company behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot and the Dall-E image generator. It has already been reported that Microsoft is looking to incorporate various OpenAI products into its own offers. For one, ChatGPT will be offered to Microsoft enterprise customers as part of the Azure OpenAI services. There are also reports about ChatGPT likely being plugged into Bing Search to help Microsoft take on Google.
“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. 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,” Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft said in a press statement.
Here are four points to note about Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI. Here’s a quick look.
How much has Microsoft invested so far in OpenAI?
Back in 2019, Microsoft made its first investment of $1 billion in OpenAI. Similarly, the company invested $2 billion between 2019 and 2023. Now, the company has invested $10 billion. Hence, Microsoft has invested close to $13 billion in the AI start-up.
Microsoft and OpenAI partnership: How will it work?
According to the official press note, Microsoft will build specialised supercomputers to scale OpenAI’s independent AI research. This will help engineers and computer architects to test and deploy new features on products like ChatGPT and Dall.E. Besides, Microsoft will also continue to build Azure’s AI infrastructure to help customers to built and deploy their own AI solution on a global scale. Keep in mind that OpenAI already runs on Azure infrastructure.
Microsoft will be the exclusive cloud service provider to OpenAI
With this latest 10 billion deal, Microsoft will become the exclusive cloud service provider to OpenAI and its various products. OpenAI’s all workloads related to products, research, and API will be stored on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
What will Microsoft get from OpenAI?
Microsoft has confirmed to offer new AI-backed experiences on its consumer and enterprise products. This likely means we could see some form of ChatGPT, Dall-E making its way to Microsoft’s products such as Bing Search, Microsoft 365, Teams, etc. Again, the press statement does not go into details on how this will be implemented but don’t be surprised if ChatGPT makes an appearance as an assistant in the future version of Microsoft Word.
The Azure OpenAI service will also get access to ChatGPT and other tools and developers/enterprises will be able to incorporate these into their own products and applications.