Microsoft Invests Billions In ChatGPT Maker OpenAI

January 23, 2023

OpenAI and Microsoft have extended their partnership. The multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft follows their previous investments in 2019 and 2021, and will allows independent research and develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful. Microsoft may have invested as much as $10 billion.

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 provides capital needed to fulfill their mission without sacrificing our core beliefs about broadly sharing benefits and the need to prioritize safety.

“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.”

Supercomputing at scale – Microsoft will increase their investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research. They 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.

OpenAI has developed an AI text generator GPT-3 and the AI image generator Dall-E. OpenAI's ChatGPT automatically generates text based on written prompts.The software has garned the praise of tech executives and venture capitalists.

OpenAI’s founders included Sam Altman, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman. Musk resigned from the board in February 2018.