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Microsoft has revealed that it will be investing billions of additional dollars in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.
In the company’s blog post (opens in new tab)Microsoft described the investment as the “third phase of our long-term partnership” with OpenAI, promising to advance the technology and make it available to everyone worldwide.
Microsoft hopes the increased use of AI in supercomputing and research will yield 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.
AI for everyone
OpenAI was born in 2015, with Elon Musk as a co-founder and Microsoft as the first major investor, initially providing funding in 2019 and then again in 2021.
AI seems to be sweeping the minds of big tech as Microsoft is adamant that AI technologies are having the “transformative impact on the scale of the personal computer, the internet, mobile devices and the cloud”.
Google also recently announced their shift in focus to AI – albeit a little less gracefully as a means of justifying mass layoffs – as they try to avoid being left behind in the wake of popular systems like ChatGPT.
In preparing its plans, Microsoft identified key areas where its investment will be channeled. First, it will go to the development of supercomputing systems to advance AI research.
It will also expand the use of AI within its cloud computing service Azure, allowing its users to use it more widely around the world. The OpenAI service within Azure gives users direct access to OpenAI models for use in developing AI applications.
In fact, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads from research 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 to democratize AI as a platform.”
The models used by OpenAI have been trained using Azure infrastructure and are deployed on the service in the form of the various AI services offered, such as coding tool GitHub Copilot, image generator DALL·E 2 and chatbot ChatGPT.
Aside from Azure, Microsoft is looking to integrate AI more broadly into customer and business products, developing what it describes as “new categories of digital experiences” that will leverage OpenAI.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the goal of the company’s partnership with OpenAI is to “responsibly advance advanced AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform.”
“In this next phase of our collaboration, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, added that “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work to create advanced AI that benefits everyone.”
Microsoft also mentioned its and OpenAI’s concern to keep AI development safe, pointing to their commitment to AI Alignment (opens in new tab) – ensuring AI stays within the realm of human values and intentions – and Microsoft’s framework for what it calls a Responsible AI standard (opens in new tab)which it hopes will safely guide industry development of AI systems.