Microsoft extends partnership with OpenAI; makes multibillion investment

Tech giant Microsoft announced that it is extending its partnership with OpenAI with a multiyear, undisclosed multibillion dollar investment to accelerate Artificial Intelligence (AI) breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world. This agreement follows previous investments in 2019 and 2021.

This is the third phase of Microsoft’s long-term partnership with OpenAI. According to Microsoft, “this extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.”

With this investment, OpenAI will be able to to continue its independent research. Open Ai remains a capped-profit company and is governed by the OpenAI non-profit. This structure allows OpenAI to raise the capital it needs to fulfill its mission without sacrificing our core beliefs about broadly sharing benefits and the need to prioritize safety.

Microsoft says it will increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research. It will also continue to build out Azure’s leading AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale

Microsoft will also deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology. This includes Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, which empowers developers to build cutting-edge AI applications through direct access to OpenAI models backed by Azure’s trusted, enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure and tools.

We reported a couple of days ago that Microsoft is planning to integrate OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot technology into its popular office applications to improve efficiency and productivity. It has already started working with OpenAI to incorporate its ChatGPT software into the Bing search engine.

“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, 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.”

“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”

This new partnership extension will also see Microsoft being OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. This means that Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services.

Interestingly, this development comes days after Microsoft announced that it was laying off 10,000 workers due to economic downturn and change in focus.