On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a “multiyear, multi-billion-dollar” investment of $10 billion into OpenAI, the US-based AI research and tool development company. Through this partnership, both companies have planned to accelerate AI breakthroughs to share with the world. The announcement of the investment came just a week after rumors of 10,000 layoffs were made by the Microsoft spokesperson. The two companies have been working in partnership on various AI projects, and the new investment will help further strengthen their partnership.
Microsoft’s cloud services are expected to power OpenAI’s workloads, giving developers and organizations access to pioneering AI infrastructure, models, and tools. Moreover, Microsoft plans to install OpenAI’s models across various consumer and enterprise products, with rumors of ChatGPT integration into Bing search results, along with the AI technology integration into Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. OpenAI will continue to be a capped-profit company even after the investment, allowing it to maintain to raise capital with balances and checks in place. Microsoft’s key spokesperson stated that the two companies have a shared ambition to correctly advance AI research and democratize AI as a technology platform.
This investment is a sign of the rising importance of AI technology in today’s world, and Microsoft is placing itself to be at the forefront of this technology. By joining forces with OpenAI, Microsoft will gain access to the latest R&D in AI and will be able to bring these advances to its products and services. This investment also allows Microsoft to tap into OpenAI’s huge base of talent and resources, giving them a competitive edge in the AI space.
The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI had continued since 2019 when Microsoft invested $1 billion in the startup and expanded to include various projects. The companies have worked together to build and deploy AI technology across various products and services. Microsoft has also used OpenAI’s technology to operate its search engine, Bing, and to challenge search giant Google.
The investment from Microsoft comes as OpenAI continues to grow and develop its technology. The company is currently projecting $1 billion in revenue by 2024 and has released a string of products that have captured the public’s attention. OpenAI’s DALL-E family of image generators and GPT models can generate images and compose lengthy passages of text—including computer code—often indistinguishable from what humans would write. The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI is a major move for both companies and is likely to help propel them further in AI.