Microsoft and OpenAI, the company behind runaway AI success ChatGPT, have extended their partnership, lending credence to rumours swirling over the last few weeks about the former’s products like its Office apps and Bing search engine could be getting some deeper integration with the popular chatbot.
Terms of the new multi-year multi-billion dollar partnership haven’t been disclosed.
Here is what Open Ai has posted on its blog:
Microsoft shares this vision and our values, and our partnership is instrumental to our progress.
- We’ve worked together to build multiple supercomputing systems powered by Azure, which we use to train all of our models. Azure’s unique architecture 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.
- Learning from real-world use – and incorporating those lessons – is a critical part of developing powerful AI systems that are safe and useful. Scaling that use also ensures AI’s benefits can be distributed broadly. So, we’ve partnered with Microsoft to deploy our technology through our API and the Azure OpenAI Service — enabling enterprise and developers to build on top of GPT, DALL·E, and Codex. We’ve also worked together to build OpenAI’s technology into apps like GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Designer.
- In an effort to build and deploy safe AI systems, our teams regularly collaborate to review and synthesize shared lessons – and use them to inform iterative updates to our systems, future research, and best practices for use of these powerful AI systems across the industry.
Here’s what Microsoft shared on its blog:
This agreement follows our previous investments in 2019 and 2021. It extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.
- Supercomputing at scale – Microsoft will increase our investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research. We will also continue to build out Azure’s leading AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale.
- New AI-powered experiences – Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across our 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.
- Exclusive cloud provider – As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services.
Microsoft was an early investor in Open AI, backing the now hotly-sought startup in 2016 and renewing its commitment with a further USD 1 billion cash injection 3 years later.
