Microsoft confirms multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E. In the process, the American company wants to push AI technologies in its services and products.
By announcing the dismissal of 10,000 people in mid-January, the boss of Microsoft could not help but have a word about artificial intelligence. ” The next great wave of computing is being born through advances in AI as we transform the world’s most advanced models into a new computing platform “, prophesied Satya Nadella.
We understand better the meaning of these words today: in a blog post published Monday, January 23, the American company unveiled the increased tightening of its ties with the OpenAI company, which is behind some of the most high-profile projects in the sector. It was OpenAI that designed ChatGPT (based on the GPT-3 language model, soon to be replaced by GPT-4) and Dall-E.
” Today, we are announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment aimed at accelerating breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to ensure these benefits are widely shared with the whole world says the software giant.
Microsoft wants to bring out new “digital experiences”
If the details of the investment — like its duration — are not detailed (we speak ofa sum of 10 billion dollarsi.e. ten times more than the amount released in 2019), two main areas are nevertheless mentioned:
- Firstly, at the cloud level: Microsoft is asserting itself as the exclusive hosting service provider for OpenAI, whether in terms of research, products and services for interfacing with its tools, via APIs. Therefore, Microsoft is committed to increasing its investments to develop and deploy all Azure infrastructure (Microsoft’s cloud service) and in supercomputers to ” accelerate OpenAI’s research into AI. »
- On the services side, then: Microsoft confirms what the press has been reporting for a few weeks. The colossal investments of the Redmond firm are far from disinterested (in addition to the announcement of 2023, Microsoft has already invested twice, in 2019 and 2021). The group hears introduce new categories of digital experiences based on OpenAI technology », as much for companies as for the general public.
Among the tracks mentioned in the media, there is that of the interconnection between ChatGPT and Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. You have to imagine what an online search powered by artificial intelligence would be like, with more relevant results, adapting to new requests while retaining previous instructions, to offer tailor-made information.
This could be an opportunity to shake up the hierarchy of search engines, with Google now largely dominating. The stakes are colossal and justify, on the one hand, the amounts mobilized by Microsoft reported in the press and, on the other hand, the knee-jerk reaction at Googlewhich has sounded the alarm and intends to retaliate with more than twenty products.
Another possible perspective: boost current Microsoft products with ChatGPT. We think of the Office office suite, whether for filling out documents (Word), writing emails or searching for information in your mailbox (Outlook), organizing data in spreadsheets (Excel) and so on. .
OpenAI has developed several projects around its artificial intelligence tools, but three of them focus all the attention today. There’s ChatGPT, which provides natural language responses to user queries or performs certain written tasks. DALL-E generates images from descriptions. Finally, Copilot helps code on GitHub.
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