The emergence of large language models is becoming a critical platform for people to innovate, use AI to solve big problems and imagine what’s possible.
Microsoft has announced the third phase of its long-term partnership with OpenAI, which includes a new multiyear, multi-billion dollar investment, ChatGPT will be added to the company’s cloud-based Azure OpenAI service soon.
However, Microsoft did not reveal the exact amount of the investment, but news website Semafor reported earlier this month that the Washington state-based company was in talks to invest nearly $10 billion in OpenAI.
This plan builds on Microsoft’s previous investments in the company, which occurred in 2019 and 2021.
Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI partnered in 2019 to extend Microsoft’s cloud arm’s capabilities in large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) systems, with the software giant investing an initial $1 billion. In the years that followed, Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI tripled to US $3 billion, an amount that was said to have enabled the former to build its renowned chatbot, ChatGPT.
The giant tech company, Microsoft and OpenAI’s multiyear exclusive computing partnership, which began in 2019, also meant that both companies would be developing new AI supercomputing technologies for the software giant’s Azure cloud platform. In the meantime, OpenAI adapted its existing services to work on Azure.
It wasn’t until 2023, however, that Microsoft made its Azure OpenAI service widely available to all its enterprise customers. After all, the software behemoth intends to quickly develop and deploy new products based on OpenAI’s technology.
Microsoft sees these technologies as a way to broaden and improve its already extensive portfolio of products for businesses, computer programmers, and consumers, while also increasing revenue across its Azure cloud computing services.
Microsoft stated in a statement announcing its new investment in OpenAI, that it will continue to deploy OpenAI’s models across many of its product lines. The company specifically stated that its partnership with OpenAI will allow the company to expand offerings in its Azure OpenAI service. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing service.
The company also stated that it will increase its investments in developing and using supercomputing systems to speed up OpenAI’s independent AI research. The company plans to incorporate OpenAI’s models into its consumer and enterprise products, as well as launch new categories of digital experiences based on OpenAI’s tech.
In a blog post, Microsoft said, they are confident in the quality of the AI models they use to provide to customers today as the pace of innovation in the AI community is breakneck. They also indicated to be tremendously excited to be at the forefront of these advancements with our customers and look forward to helping more people to benefit from them in 2023.
OpenAI is an AI-focused research and development company. Elon Musk, an American billionaire, and others founded the company in late 2015.
It focuses on developing software that can learn and adapt to new tasks.
The mission of OpenAI is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is, highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at the most economically valuable work benefit humanity as a whole.
Building on the two companies’ relationship, Microsoft is considering a much larger stake in OpenAI, and the company announced that it will soon add OpenAI’s AI bot ChatGPT to its cloud-based Azure service.
The service will give the software giant’s cloud customers access to various OpenAI tools such as the GPT-3.5 language system, on which is based, and the ChatGPT, and the Dall – E model for generating images from text prompts.
ChatGPT, a free writing tool was released by OpenAI. The launch sparked widespread media interest in the current possibilities involving new developments in artificial intelligence.
What is a ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an OpenAI-developed large language model chatbot based on GPT-3.5. It has an amazing ability to interact in the form of a conversational dialogue and provide responses that appear surprisingly human.
Many users are impressed by its ability to provide human-quality responses, raising the quality that it could one day disrupt how humans interact with computers and change how information is retrieved.
However, despite ChatGPT’s rapid popularity due to its ability to return responses that appear to have been written by actual people, educators expressed concern that it could be easily used for cheating, as those who tried the tool said they would have given its responses a good grade if a student claimed to have written them.
ChatGPT is currently free to use, but OpenAI intends to charge for it in the future. It has already opened a waitlist for those interested in testing a paid version of the bot.
What are Azure OpenAI services?
The Azure OpenAI service exposes REST APIs to OpenAI’s powerful language models, such as the GPT-3, codex, and embeddings model series.
These models are easily adaptable to your specific task, such as content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language code translation. Users can use REST APIs, python SDKs, and a web-based interface in Azure OpenAI studio to access the services.
Businesses and developers can utilize these Azure OpenAI service features in their apps and workloads.
Developers could use Azure OpenAI to create apps that use AI for support tickets or content matching to improve search results in online stores. These models are already widely used as tools for document summarization and text analysis.
Microsoft is rumored to be preparing to compete with Google by integrating ChatGPT into Bing search results, and the company is reportedly considering integrating some language AI technology into its word, PowerPoint, and Outlook apps.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine may soon become more sensitive to use requirements and return results in a more human-like manner.
While ChatGPT is a good example of the potential of artificial intelligence, it is far from perfect. According to FAQ, OpenAI has limited knowledge of the world, and events after 2021 may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.
However, Microsoft advocates for a “responsible approach to AI”, and as a result, the company has implemented safeguards to ensure that developers do not abuse its Azure OpenAI service. All developer applications will be reviewed, and content filters will be in place to catch abusive and hateful content.
This expansion may help Microsoft gain a competitive advantage. Google reportedly sees ChatGPT as a threat to its search business and is said to be devoting much of its attention to a search chatbot and other AI products, despite a reluctance to embrace the technology due to copyright concerns fully.
Even if the expanded OpenAI partnership has no effort on Bing, Microsoft may benefit by forcing competitors such as Google to change course.
This piece first appeared on Engadget.