In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the tiny San Francisco company that designed ChatGPT. And in the years since, it has quietly invested another $2 billion, according to two people familiar with the investment who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media. The $3 billion paid for the huge amounts of computing power that OpenAI needed to build the chatbot. And it meant that Microsoft could rapidly build and deploy new products based on the technology.
Microsoft is now poised to challenge Big Tech competitors like Google, Amazon and Apple with a technological advantage the company has not possessed for more than two decades. Microsoft is in talks to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI as it seeks to push its technology even further, according to a person familiar with the matter.
…Mr. Nadella worked with AI technologies when he ran Microsoft’s Bing search engine more than a decade ago, and for several years he has convened a biweekly internal meeting of AI leaders. “The expectation from Satya is that we’re pushing the envelope in AI, and we’re going to do that across our products”, Eric Boyd, the executive responsible for Microsoft’s AI platform team, said in an interview.
Microsoft’s new talks with OpenAI were reported earlier by Semafor. Its additional $2 billion investment in the company was earlier reported by The Information and Fortune.
…OpenAI is working on an even more powerful system called GPT-4, which could be released as soon as this quarter, according to Mr. McIlwain and 4 other people with knowledge of the effort. Microsoft declined to comment on its future product plans.
Built using Microsoft’s huge network for computer data centers, the new chatbot could be a system much like ChatGPT that solely generates text. Or it could juggle images as well as text. Some venture capitalists and Microsoft employees have already seen the service in action. But OpenAI has not yet determined whether the new system will be released with capabilities involving images.
…Speaking in India last week, Mr. Nadella presented data that indicated as much as 10% of all data could be AI-generated in just 3 years, which could lead to as much as $7 billion in revenue for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing product, said Gil Luria who researches Microsoft for the investment bank D.A. Davidson.