Microsoft and OpenAI have announced that they’re extending their partnership with “a multiyear, multibillion dollar” investment to more quickly deliver AI breakthroughs. The partners said they’re looking to share the benefits with the world but also that developers and organizations will get access to the best tools via Azure to help build and run their applications.
Microsoft didn’t specifically say how much money it was investing in OpenAI but there’s a good chance it’s around $10 billion, as Neowin previously reported. Microsoft and OpenAI did, however, outline the benefits of the partnership. Firstly, Microsoft will help with the deployment of specialized supercomputers so OpenAI can do its work quicker. Secondly, Microsoft will deploy OpenAI models to its consumer and enterprise products to introduce “new categories of digital experiences”. Finally, Azure will be OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, powering OpenAI’s 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.”
OpenAI’s ChatGPT was an instant hit after launching near the end of 2022. As a result, users were seeing notices that lots of people were using ChatGPT so it may be slow and in some cases, access wasn’t allowed at all in some cases because too many people were using the service.
Hopefully, the investment from Microsoft will help OpenAI overcome this limitation so everyone can use a responsive AI whenever needed. It’ll also be interesting to see whether it remains free to use or whether some pricing model eventually gets implemented, after all, that processing costs money.