OpenAI and Microsoft announce extended, multi-billion-dollar partnership

On Monday, AI tech darling OpenAI announced that it obtained a “multi-year, multi-billion greenback funding” from Microsoft, following earlier investments in 2019 and 2021. Whereas the 2 corporations haven’t formally introduced a greenback quantity on the deal, the information follows rumors of a $10 billion investment that emerged two weeks in the past.

Based in 2015, OpenAI has been behind a number of key applied sciences that made 2022 the year that generative AI went mainstream, together with DALL-E picture synthesis, the ChatGPT chatbot (powered by GPT-3), and GitHub Copilot for programming help. ChatGPT, specifically, has made Google reportedly “panic” to craft a response, whereas Microsoft has reportedly been working on integrating OpenAI’s language mannequin know-how into its Bing search engine.

“The previous three years of our partnership have been nice,” mentioned Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in a Microsoft news release. “Microsoft shares our values and we’re excited to proceed our unbiased analysis and work towards creating superior AI that advantages everybody.”

Particularly, the 2 corporations say they’ll work on supercomputing at scale to speed up OpenAI’s analysis, integrating OpenAI’s know-how into extra Microsoft merchandise and “digital experiences” and maintaining Microsoft as OpenAI’s unique cloud provider with Azure. “OpenAI has used this infrastructure to coach its breakthrough fashions, which at the moment are deployed in Azure to energy category-defining AI merchandise like GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2, and ChatGPT,” wrote Microsoft.

The businesses additionally reaffirmed their “shared dedication to constructing AI methods and merchandise which are reliable and protected,” following Microsoft’s “Responsible AI Standard” and OpenAI’s efforts at AI Alignment analysis, which mainly search to finally create AGI (human-level AI) that will not flip all of us into paperclips.

The partnership is a probably profitable step for the 2 corporations as they rush to construct a synthetic substitute for human mind. As OpenAI’s about page confirms, “OpenAI’s mission is to make sure that synthetic normal intelligence (AGI)—by which we imply extremely autonomous methods that outperform people at most economically worthwhile work—advantages all of humanity.”