Microsoft pours billions into ChatGPT
Microsoft see AI as the future of computing.
Microsoft is stepping up its investment in the artificial intelligence realm, and has announced it is expanding its partnership with OpenAI. According to Microsoft, this will be the third phase in its tie-up with OpenAI, representing a “multi-billion dollar investment” in its effort to be at the forefront of all things AI.
“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 this next phase of our partnership, developers and organisations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”
From now on, Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure will be used exclusively to power OpenAI workloads, API services, research, and backend systems. Microsoft will also use OpenAI to enhance its products to create “new categories of digital experiences.” Those experiences will leverage OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a conversational AI routine that can be used to write articles, poetry, and even debug code.
It has been reported that Microsoft plans to fuse ChatGPT with its Bing search engine to become more competitive with Google (or, more specifically, the Google
Knowledge Graph). Perhaps even more interesting is the rumour that claims Microsoft intends to bring the GPT text-generation model to Microsoft Word and Outlook. This would potentially let AI write emails for you based on input commands, or flesh out an article you’re writing using information siphoned from the web.
Microsoft’s investment in AI should not come as a surprise to anyone. When Nadella announced that the company would lay off 10,000 employees this year, he noted that “the next major wave of computing is being born with advances in AI, as we’re turning the world’s most advanced models into a new computing platform.”
OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by a group of tech luminaries, including Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. Its mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” and the company’s continued partnership with Microsoft will hopefully advance those efforts.
“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Altman, who serves as OpenAI’s CEO. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”