Microsoft has revealed that it will invest billions of dollars more in OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT.
In the company’s blog post, Microsoft described the investment as “the third phase of our long-term partnership” with OpenAI, and promised to advance the technology and make it available to everyone, globally.
Microsoft hopes that the increasing use of artificial intelligence in supercomputing and search will lead to commercially viable technologies for the company to take advantage of, echoing other calls it has made recently, such as its desire to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine.
Artificial intelligence for everyone
OpenAI was born in 2015, with Elon Musk as one of its founders, and Microsoft as the first big investor, providing funding initially in 2019, and then again in 2021.
AI seems to be capturing big tech minds, with Microsoft insisting that AI technologies are having a “transformative impact the size of the PC, the Internet, mobile devices and the cloud”.
Google has also announced a shift in its focus to AI recently – albeit in a somewhat less gracious way as a way to justify mass layoffs – as it looks to prevent being left behind in the wake of popular systems like ChatGPT.
When developing its plans, Microsoft has identified the main areas to which its investments will be directed. First, it will go towards the development of supercomputer systems in order to advance research in the field of artificial intelligence.
It will also expand the use of artificial intelligence in the Azure cloud computing service, so that its users can use it more widely around the world. The OpenAI service within Azure will allow users to directly access OpenAI models for use in developing AI applications.
In fact, Azure will run all of OpenAI’s workloads, from search tasks to products and API services. This fits with Microsoft’s lofty ambitions for the cloud, as it hopes Azure will become “an AI supercomputer for the world, serving as the foundation of our vision of democratizing AI as a platform.”
The models used by OpenAI were trained using Azure infrastructure, and deployed to the service in the form of the various AI services offered, such as the GitHub Copilot encoder, the DALL E 2 image generator and the ChatGPT chatbot.
Apart from Azure, Microsoft wants to integrate AI into customer and business products more broadly, developing what it describes as “new classes of digital experiences” that will take advantage of OpenAI.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the goal of the company’s partnership with OpenAI is 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.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman added, “Microsoft shares our values and we’re excited to continue our independent research and work to create advanced AI that benefits everyone.”
Microsoft also mentioned its and OpenAI’s interest in keeping AI development safe, citing its commitment to AI alignment — making sure AI remains within the realm of human values and intentions — and Microsoft’s framework for what it calls the Responsible AI Standard, which it hopes will guide industry development of intelligence systems. safely artificial.
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