Software giant, Microsoft, has said it will add OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT to its cloud-based Azure service.
This comes as the company announced a wider availability of the Azure OpenAI Service, which it said will democratize AI and deepen its partnership with the AI company.
Azure OpenAI Service, which has been available to a limited set of customers since it was unveiled in 2021, gives Microsoft’s cloud customers access to various OpenAI tools like the GPT-3.5 language system that ChatGPT is based on, as well as the Dall-E model for generating images from text prompts. This enables Azure customers to use the OpenAI products in their applications running in the cloud.
Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of AI Platform, Eric Boyd, said in a blog post that with Azure OpenAI Service now generally available, more businesses can apply for access to the most advanced AI models in the world—including GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL-E.
- “Customers will also be able to access ChatGPT—a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure—through Azure OpenAI Service soon,” he said.
Investment in OpenAI: Microsoft’s extension of ChatGPT to its wider customers and plans to deepen its partnership with OpenAI further strengthen the yet-to-be-confirmed reports that the company is planning to invest $10 billion in the AI company.
- Microsoft had earlier 2019 invested $1 billion in OpenAI, which marked the beginning of their partnership.
- With more investment, the company is looking to get an inside edge on the most popular and advanced AI systems to boost its products in competition with Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com, and Meta Platforms.
OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by big tech figures including Tesla boss Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder Thiel and investor Sam Altman, to develop “safe” AI. Its earliest backers included Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Andreessen Horowitz. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI as part of an agreement to jointly develop new computing technologies.
OpenAI released the newest form of its GPT-3.5 software at the end of last year. The chatbot, which can converse with users through text and images, went viral and surpassed 1 million users in 5 days.
