Generative AI company OpenAI held its first developer"s conference, DevDay, earlier today, and in the middle of its opening keynote, the company"s CEO Sam Altman invited a surprise guest to the stage: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
While Nadella"s appearance was brief, he did talk about the two companies" continuing partnership. Microsoft reportedly has invested $13 billion into OpenAI, according to CNBC, and uses its ChatGPT and DALL-E generative AI service for Bing Chat, Bing Image Creator, and more.
Nadella told Altman that the rise of OpenAI has made himself and Microsoft think differently about data infrastructure in general and for the company"s Azure systems in particular. Nadella stated:
The workload, the pattern of the workload, the training jobs are so synchronous and so large so and so data parallel. So the first thing we"ve been doing is building, in partnership with you, the system; all the way from thinking from power to the DC to the rack, to the accelerators, to the network, and just really the shape of Azure is drastically changed.
And it"s changing rapidly in support of these models that you"re building. And so our job number one is to build the best system so that you can build the best models, and then make that all available to developers.
During the keynote, Altman said of Microsoft, "I think we have the best partnership in tech." It seems clear that OpenAI and Microsoft are both pleased with their team-up, and it looks pretty solid to continue in the future, especially if it gets more developers to sign up for Azure and use OpenAI"s tools and services.
During DevDay, OpenAI announced a plan to allow developers to create their own ChatGPT services without coding. It also launched a preview of its GPT-4 Turbo model, which has "knowledge of world events up to April 2023" and is cheaper to use compared to ChatGPT 4.