Microsoft Inc has announced its decision to prepare a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company that developed the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. Through this investment, Microsoft hopes to add OpenAI’s capabilities to its own software capabilities as it looks to gain the edge over competitors Google and Salesforce.
Having invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, Microsoft is looking to have access to the company’s AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure, using such resources to build and run their applications.
“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,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced.
“We’ve worked together to build multiple supercomputing systems powered by Azure, which we use to train all of our models. Azure’s unique architectural design has been crucial in delivering best-in-class performance and scale for our AI training and inference workloads. Microsoft will increase their investment in these systems to accelerate our independent research and Azure will remain the exclusive cloud provider for all OpenAI workloads across our research, API, and products.”
Microsoft’s decision to invest comes at a precarious time, with the company announcing its decision to lay off 10,000 employees by the end of Q3.