Microsoft revealed on Monday that it would boost its investment in OpenAI, banking its future on the company and its cutting-edge technology that gave rise to the ChatGPT chatbot boom and opened the door for more Google and Alphabet Inc. product rivalry.
Microsoft stated, “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 is capitalizing on a bet it made on OpenAI around 4-years ago and recently hailed an AI revolution. Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman co-founded the firm in 2019 and invested $1 billion in it. Since then, among other ways of support, it has developed a supercomputer to support OpenAI’s technology.
Satya Nadella (CEO & Chairman, Microsoft) said, “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.” Further, he goes on to say, “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 investing even more resources to maintain the two companies at the forefront by utilizing so-called generative AI, a technique that can learn from huge data how to create practically any form of content just given a text command. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which writes prose or poetry on demand, was the standout example that attracted a lot of attention in Silicon Valley last year.
Microsoft announced last week that it planned to include such AI in all of its products, as OpenAI continues its mission to develop artificial intelligence that is comparable to human intelligence. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, which is being mentioned as a potential Google rival for the first time in years, already incorporates OpenAI technology.