Microsoft investing billions into OpenAI

Talk about a massive investment push: Microsoft Corp. is continuing its investment in OpenAI, whose artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT continues to light up the market. Microsoft first invested in 2019, and subsequent and future rounds are predicted to push the total to over $10 billion. Wowsers!

What does Microsoft want from this partnership? Well as usual, the big players are getting into what they deem the next big thing. Microsoft sees it as a chance to take on Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc., who also have big AI plans.

According to CEO Saty Nadella: “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.”

ChatGPT has been called the first real threat to Google’s core search business. While that is to be seen, what we do know is that OpenAI uses Microsoft’s cloud-based service Azure to train all of its models and that Microsoft’s investment will allow it to accelerate its independent research. And, tellingly, Microsoft itself is currently using the developer’s language AI to add automation to its Copilot programming tool, and wants to add such technology to its Bing search. Let’s see where this all leads!