MICROSOFT has revealed plans to invest billions into ChartGPT’s parent company OpenAI.
On Monday, Microsoft announced it was making a “multi-year multibillion-dollar investment” in OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) lab that created ChatGPT.
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“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 of 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.”
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform that provides access, management, and development of applications and services via global data centers.
While Microsoft’s latest investment remains undisclosed, a source familiar with the matter told the New York Times it was around $10billion.
This amount is on top of $3billion that Microsoft has already invested into OpenAI, the Times noted.
Microsoft is hoping the ongoing partnership propels it past Google, Meta, and Apple in AI innovation – and specifically, generative AI.
This refers to technologies that can generate natural language text, images, and other content in response to short prompts.
One of OpenAI’s most popular generative software is ChatGpt, a natural language advanced chatbot.
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ChatGPT can complete many tasks in seconds, including writing essays, poems, and even complex code.
“These innovations have captured imaginations and introduced large-scale AI as a powerful, general-purpose technology platform that we believe will create transformative impact at the magnitude of the personal computer, the internet, mobile devices and the cloud,” Microsoft’s statement reads.
And now, with the help of Microsoft, OpenAI says it hopes to create newer innovations and put out more revolutionary AI.
Microsoft’s investment comes shortly after the company announced 10,000 layoffs earlier this month.
Among those affected are industry veterans who have worked at Xbox for more than a decade.
Developers from popular studios such as Bethesda and 343 Industries have also been affected, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Nadella said the layoffs are to lower costs and allow Microsoft to shift its focus onto artificial intelligence, which the CEO called “the next major wave of computing.”
