OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI tool ChatGPT, announced on Monday that it has secured an additional investment running into billions of dollars from Microsoft.
Nairametrics understands that the investment will allow OpenAI to continue its independent research towards developing AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.
Note that the latest investment extends the partnership between the two tech companies.
Status quo remains: OpenAI also noted that the investment by Microsoft will not change its status as a capped-profit company, saying:
- “In pursuit of our mission to ensure advanced AI benefits all of humanity, OpenAI remains a capped-profit company and is governed by the OpenAI non-profit. This structure allows us to raise the capital we need to fulfil our mission without sacrificing our core beliefs about broadly sharing benefits and the need to prioritize safety.
- “Microsoft shares this vision and our values, and our partnership is instrumental to our progress.”
Accelerating AI: Microsoft confirmed the investment in a blog post seen by Nairametrics, saying that it would accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure the benefits are broadly shared with the world.
The official announcements confirmed the earlier speculations that Microsoft was planning to invest $10 billion into OpenAi, although the two companies are not revealing the actual amount.
Microsoft/OpenAI partnership: According to Microsoft, the latest investment follows its previous investments in 2019 and 2021 and it extends the ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of the two companies to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.
- “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. In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications,” said Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella.
Meanwhile, the Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, Sam Altman said:
- “The past three years of our partnership have been great. Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”
The backstory: In 2019, Microsoft announced it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI to jointly develop new technologies for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and to “further extend” large-scale AI capabilities. In exchange, OpenAI agreed to license some of its intellectual property to Microsoft, which the company would then commercialize and sell to partners, and to train and run AI models on Azure as OpenAI worked to develop next-generation computing hardware.