Microsoft and OpenAI seal multi-billion-dollar deal

The company announced multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investments in the California-based AI startup OpenAI.

In this next phase of our partnership with @OpenAI, we will deliver the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain for customers to safely and responsibly build and run their applications on Azure. https://t.co/hX48N3vPv8

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) January 23, 2023

“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared commitment to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize it as a new technology platform,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

According to him, in the next phase of the collaboration, developers and organisations from various industries will gain access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and the Azure toolset to build and run applications.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman welcomed the deal with the tech giant.

“Microsoft shares our values, and we are pleased to continue independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that will benefit everyone,” he said.

Financial and technical details of the collaboration were not disclosed. Earlier reported that the value of the agreement had reached $10 billion.

According to media reports, Microsoft will receive 75% of OpenAI’s profits until it recoups its investment. After that, the tech giant will own 49% of the startup’s equity.

This is Microsoft’s third investment in OpenAI. In 2019, the software giant выделил AI developers $1 billion. Two years later, the company conducted a second round of funding.

In 2020, Microsoft получила an exclusive license to include the GPT-3 language model in its own technologies and applications. At the same time, the startup gained access to the corporation’s computing power.

The California company’s developments form the basis for several of the tech giant’s products, including the AI coding assistant GitHub Copilot and the cloud service Azure OpenAI.

Microsoft also plans to integrate ChatGPT into a range of existing services such as Office and Bing.

In January, Altman spoke about future projects, his relationship with Microsoft, and his view of artificial general intelligence.

In the same month, the tech giant announced layoffs of 10 000 employees.

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