Microsoft intends to spend lavishly to put the OpenAI start-up on its own little cloud with a multi-year partnership.
The relatively young company behind the explosively successful tools ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 has already been the foal of the American giant for the past three years. We mentioned last week a rumor indicating that Microsoft was going to invest 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, but the case seems to take on a whole new dimension.
Microsoft rolls out the red carpet for OpenAI
It is therefore no longer a question of an investment with a fixed sum, but rather of a ” investment of several billion dollars over several years “. Founded in 2015, the extremely promising start-up that is OpenAI thus becomes a more than privileged partner of Microsoft.
” We formed this partnership with OpenAI around a common ambition to responsibly evolve the search for cutting-edge artificial intelligences, and to democratize AI as a new technological platform. “Said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, in a blog post announcing the merger between the two entities.
” In this new phase of our partnership, developers and organizations from all industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models and tools to build and run their applications with Azure. “, he continues.
An Azure future for OpenAI
The objective for Microsoft could not be clearer: the American giant thus becomes the exclusive cloud partner of OpenAI, and its Azure technology will power all the products and services of the start-up. In view of the success of the latter, a few billion dollars seem a relatively meager price to pay for the Redmond firm.
We could already see the beginnings of such an agreement with insistent rumors around the integration of ChatGPT in Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, or even an AI based on DALL-E in its Office suite. ChatGPT could also join its sister there.
If other rumors are to be believed, Microsoft could also become the recipient of 75% of OpenAI’s profits, until it secures its return on investment. It should also obtain 49% of the shares of the start-up.
And this risks representing a colossal sum, while a potential IPO of OpenAI would value it at $29 billion, and the highly acclaimed ChatGPT has just recently offered a paid version at a monthly price that does not increase. turns out not given.
Source : Microsoft
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