Microsoft announced on Monday that it would increase its investment in OpenAI, betting its future on the startup and technology that gave birth to the ChatGPT chatbot phenomenon and paving the way for increased competition with Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
In a blog post, Microsoft said, ”Today, we are announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world.”
Microsoft, which recently declared an AI revolution, is expanding on an investment it made in OpenAI nearly four years ago. It invested $1 billion in the startup co-founded by Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman in 2019, and it has since built a supercomputer to power OpenAI’s technology, among other things.
“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,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “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.”
Microsoft is devoting even more resources to keeping the two businesses at the forefront by utilising so-called generative AI, a technology that can learn from vast data how to create virtually any type of content simply from a text prompt.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates prose or poetry on demand, was a standout example that drew a lot of attention in Silicon Valley last year.
As OpenAI continues its quest to create artificial intelligence comparable to human intelligence, Microsoft announced last week that it intends to incorporate such AI into all of its products. For the first time in years, Microsoft has already integrated OpenAI technology into Bing, the company’s search engine, which is being discussed as a potential Google competitor. The eagerly anticipated investment demonstrates how Google, the originator of significant AI research, is now planning its own unveiling for this spring.
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