Microsoft to invest multibillion dollars in Open AI to accelerate AI breakthroughs
Microsoft on Jan 23, 2023, announced a multibillion dollar investment with Open AI to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure the benefits are broadly shared with the world.
The agreement follows Microsoft’s previous 2019 and 2021 investments and extends Microsoft’s ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research. This will enable Microsoft 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.
“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,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “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.”
“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”
Since 2016, Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, serving to democratize AI as a platform. Through the initial investment Microsoft and OpenAI pushed the frontier of supercomputing technology by announcing their top 5 supercomputer in 2020, and subsequently constructing multiple AI supercomputing systems at massive scale.
OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its models, which are now deployed in Azure to power category-defining AI products like GitHub Copilot, DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT.
Microsoft believes that these innovations will create transformative impact at the magnitude of the personal computer, the internet, mobile devices and the cloud.
As per Microsoft’s blog:
“Microsoft and OpenAI’s shared commitment to building AI systems and products that are trustworthy and safe. OpenAI’s leading research on AI Alignment and Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard not only establish a leading and advancing framework for the safe deployment of our own AI technologies, but will also help guide the industry toward more responsible outcomes.”