Microsoft will invest 10,000 million in the ChatGPT company to boost artificial intelligence

Microsoft redoubles its commitment to supercomputing and artificial intelligence.

The company that Satya Nadella runs was already a reference partner of OpenAI, the company that launched the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT that has dazzled the world.

Now, it is preparing to invest an additional 10 billion dollars over several years.

"Today we're announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multi-year, billion-dollar investment to accelerate advances in artificial intelligence and ensure these benefits are shared broadly with the world," Microsoft said in a statement. release.

Although the official information does not reveal the figure, sources familiar with the operation cited by Bloomberg place it at 10,000 million dollars over several years.

Microsoft already invested 1,000 million dollars in OpenAI in 2019 and injected money again in 2021, but now it makes a much larger outlay.

Artificial intelligence has become the new great battlefield for technology, with Alphabet (the Google group), Amazon and Microsoft as the main contenders to lead it.

In particular, the creation of images and text using artificial intelligence has attracted attention with ChatGPT and Dall-E, two Open AI tools.

Alphabet sees services such as ChatGPT as a threat to the extent that their use could displace Google searches.

Whoever leads artificial intelligence will also be in a position of advantage for cloud computing and vice versa.

Although the big technology companies are limiting investments and cutting staff, they have made it clear that they will continue to bet on artificial intelligence.

Microsoft has announced the largest collective layoff in its history: some 10,000 workers, around 5% of its workforce.

“The next great wave of computing is being born with advances in artificial intelligence, as we are turning the world's most advanced models into a new computing platform,” Microsoft Chairman Satya Nadella said in the same message announcing the layoffs.

complex agreement

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will deploy OpenAI models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences based on OpenAI technology.

For its part, the tech giant will be OpenAI's exclusive cloud computing provider to process the massive amounts of data and complex models required for artificial intelligence.

The alliance also extends to supercomputing.

Microsoft will increase its investments "in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI's innovative independent AI research," the company says.

According to Bloomberg, the deal has a complicated structure because investors in OpenAI have limited returns on their investment, as it is a limited-profit company.

Microsoft will get almost half of the financial benefits of OpenAI until its investment is repaid up to a predetermined cap, according to their sources.

All benefits that go beyond what corresponds to investors and employees will revert to OpenAI.

The OpenAI LP company is governed by the board of the non-profit organization OpenAI, consisting of LP company employees Greg Brockman (Chairman), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and some directors not employed by the company.

Its investors, in addition to Microsoft, include Reid Hoffman's charitable foundation and Khosla Ventures.

The firm was founded in 2015, originally as a pure non-profit organization, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as co-chairs.

Musk, Altman, CTO Greg Brockman, former Stripe CTO, investors Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston and Peter Thiel, and firms Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys and YC Research have pledged $1 billion. in donations.

In 2018, Musk left the organization and Altman decided to create the company in order to raise resources for his investigations.

Microsoft became an OpenAI reference partner in 2019 and is now strengthening that alliance.

"We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge artificial intelligence research and democratize artificial intelligence as a new technology platform," Nadella, Microsoft's president, said in Monday's statement.

“In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across all industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications,” she added.

“The last three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI.

"Microsoft shares our values ​​and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone," he added.

Since 2016, Microsoft has been racing to turn its cloud system Azure into an AI supercomputer with the stated purpose of “democratizing AI as a platform”.

“Through our initial investment and collaboration, Microsoft and OpenAI pushed the frontier of cloud supercomputing technology, announcing our first top-5 supercomputer in 2020, and subsequently building multiple AI supercomputing systems on a massive scale.

OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its revolutionary models, which are now deployed on Azure to power category-defining AI products like GitHub Copilot, DALL-E 2, and ChatGPT.