Microsoft extends its partnership with ChatGPT developer, OpenAI, to cover AI supercomputing and research and enable commercialization, following previous investments in 2019 and 2021.
Heaptalk, Jakarta — Microsoft announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. This investment marks the third phase of Microsoft and OpenAI’s long-term partnership following previous investments in 2019 and 2021.
Although the investment amount is undisclosed, Semafor estimates that the technology giant has injected $10 billion into the company which is partially founded by Elon Musk.
The funding, which also includes other venture firms, would value OpenAI at $29 billion. However, in its report, Semafor has not been able to confirm whether the deal has been finalized but its terms indicated the agreement should be closed by the end of 2022.
Chairman and CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella delivered, “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.”
Satya further said that in this next phase of the partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchains with Azure to build and run their applications.
Meanwhile, CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman said, “The past three years of our partnership have been great. Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”
Commercializing advanced AI technologies
This agreement extends their collaboration across AI supercomputing and research as well as enables both parties to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.
In more detail, Microsoft will increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research. Microsoft 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 deploy OpenAI’s models across 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.
In addition, as OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products, and API services.
