The American IT multinational Microsoft will invest 10 billion dollars over several years in OpenAI, the creator of the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. Microsoft, which already invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and invested again in 2021, is looking to gain an edge over some of the most popular and advanced AI systems in its competition with Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Platforms.
OpenAI needs funding and the power of Microsoft’s cloud computing to process huge volumes of data and run increasingly complex models that allow programs like DALL-E to generate realistic images based on a few words.
“We have built 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, President -general manager of Microsoft, in a press release. The Chat GPT chatbot, an acronym that stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, managed to garner more than a million users in a matter of days for its ability to imitate the way people speak and write.
Its abilities have raised concerns about its potential to supplant professional writers and do student assignments for them. OpenAI said on Monday that it uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud service to train all its models and that Microsoft’s investment will allow it to accelerate its research.
The Azure OpenAI service gives Microsoft cloud users access to various OpenAI tools like the GPT-3.5 language system on which ChatGPT is based, as well as the Dall-E model for generating images from text.
The investment announcement comes less than a week from Microsoft’s decision to lay off 10,000 employees amid a slowing economy and falling demand for software.