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Microsoft has been in partnership with OpenAI since 2019. Bloomberg reported that the tech giant is pumping $10bn into the company as part of a new phase of collaboration.
Microsoft and OpenAI have confirmed that they are extending their partnership even further, with the tech giant saying it would provide a multibillion funding boost to the makers of the ChatGPT tool.
The news comes just days after Microsoft said it would be adding ChatGPT to its Azure cloud services soon.
Microsoft did not confirm the exact amount it is investing in OpenAI, however, Bloomberg reported that it is $10bn.
The investment will mark the third phase of Microsoft’s ongoing investment programme in OpenAI. The first major investment was made in 2019 and the second was made in 2021.
“It extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialise the resulting advanced AI technologies,” a blog post published by Microsoft said today (23 January).
OpenAI is the creator of AI products such as DALL-E, an AI generator that can create art from basic image descriptions.
Recently, its latest tool ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions in a conversational way, has been a major talking point.
The accuracy of ChatGPT has faced scrutiny, but Microsoft is hoping to give its search engine Bing a boost by using the chatbot as part of it.
Commenting on the latest investment by the tech giant, OpenAI said in a statement, “This multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft follows their previous investments in 2019 and 2021, and will allow us to continue our independent research and develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.”
The statement added that the company worked together with Microsoft to build multiple supercomputing systems powered by Azure.
Both companies said that they hoped the investment deal would enable OpenAI’s tech to be distributed widely to a lot of people.
The investment by Microsoft will go towards OpenAI’s research into AI. The company said it will deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products. It also plans to introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.
Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services.
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