On the heels of a rather pressing layoff spree, seeing a total of 10,000 employees go set across some of the firm's largest departments, Microsoft is siphoning an unspecified multibillion dollars into artificial intelligence company OpenAI. Announced on Monday, Jan. 23, in a press release, the company noted the extension of its investment into OpenAI as a multiyear agreement that will "accelerate AI breakthroughs" and help continue to strengthen Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, among many other things.
OpenAI is known for several of the most notable AI concepts of late, the most prominent among them being the highly popular ChatGPT, which was recently utilized by a cluster of Stanford students on finals and even passed a Wharton MBA exam on its own. Thus, while ChatGPT itself proves to be in a pickle when it comes to necessary adoption, Microsoft sees potential for its use case in search, Azure, and much more.
Leveraging something as powerful as ChatGPT in Bing for Microsoft is only the start. And it will take some time before Bing users even see this integration, but Google is certainly sweating. Beyond that, OpenAI has a suite of potential for the tech conglomerate, expressed best by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in the aforementioned press release:
"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. In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructre, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications."
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As Nadella himself mentions, this isn't the first time Microsoft has pumped money into the AI firm. In July 2019, Microsoft entered into a strategic agreement with OpenAI at a $1 billion premium, which would set the foundation for the tech conglomerate's Azure platform and help aid its endeavors in the AI frontier. Monday's announcement strengthens that bond, which allegedly cost $10 billion, seeing OpenAI's systems expand into new territories for which Microsoft has relayed as three main goalposts.
For starters, the new investment will help Microsoft expand its Azure platform and specialized supercomputing systems "to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale," as the press release relates. Second, Microsoft aims to leverage OpenAI's various models for what it is called digital experiences. It mentioned Azure OpenAI Service in the press release, highlighting consumer and enterprise products as main targets for aggressive AI-powered expansion.
The Azure OpenAI Service, which was initially debuted on January 17th, is a package of OpenAI systems for businesses to utilize artificial intelligence where necessary, specifically for integration into cloud apps. Of keen interest for most is the forthcoming inclusion of ChatGPT, which should be integrated into the system soon, but the Azure OpenAI Service allows users access to Codex, DALL-E, and GPT-3.5 for all kinds of varied purposes.
Last but certainly not least, Microsoft alludes to OpenAI as being its primary cloud provider, spanning API services, research, and products within Microsoft's guise. The tech conglomerate has something of a hold on cloud infrastructure, best witnessed via the still ongoing beta Xbox Cloud Services, which runs exceedingly well on mobile platforms.
As Nadella himself relayed amid the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, January 17th, "Every product of Microsoft will have some of the same AI capabilities to completely transform the product." He went on to add, mentioning the ChatGPT tool as one example, "We need something that truly changes the productivity curve so we can have real economic growth."
While still all but rumors, several theories suggest that Microsoft now has a 49% stake in OpenAI on top of receiving 75% of the AI firm's profits until securing its return on investment.
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