As expected, Microsoft officially announced the expansion of its partnership with OpenAI, the developer of the popular chatbot based on artificial intelligence ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E, reports Bloomberg.
The news comes less than a week after the company said it was cutting 10,000 jobs as a weakening economy reduces demand for software. In that statement, Microsoft said it will continue to invest and hire in key priority areas. And while Microsoft did not disclose the value of its investment, a person familiar with the negotiations said it will be $10 billion over several years.
The investment from Microsoft “will allow us to continue our independent research and develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful,” says OpenAI in the statement.
Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, is aiming to gain access to the most popular and cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems, competing with Alphabet, Amazon and Meta to dominate the fast-growing industry.
OpenAI, in turn, needs funding from Microsoft and cloud computing power to process massive amounts of data and run increasingly complex models that allow DALL-E to generate realistic images from a simple test description, and ChatGPT to produce surprisingly human-like spoken text in response to prompts or queries.
ChatGPT has become one of the of the Internet sensations since its launch in late November, amassing a million users in less than a week. Its capabilities have raised concerns that the chatbot may replace several professions at once in the future, including some developers. ChatGPT is also called a potential threat to mainstream search business Google.
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