OpenAI is the AI research and deployment company behind ChatGPT and DALL·E 2, two AI projects that have gained popularity for allowing users to generate realistic conversations and art, respectively, by simply typing in text. Microsoft announced today that it is extending its partnership with OpenAI with a new multiyear, multibillion dollar investment, something that will go toward accelerating the company’s AI breakthroughs for supercomputing and other projects. This marks the third phase of Microsoft’s long-term partnership with OpenAI, which already include the investments that the Windows maker made in 2019 and 2021.
“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,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”
“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”
From a Microsoft blog post:
This agreement follows our previous investments in 2019 and 2021. It extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.
- Supercomputing at scale – Microsoft will increase our investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research. We will also continue to build out Azure’s leading AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale.
- New AI-powered experiences – Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology. This includes Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, which empowers developers to build cutting-edge AI applications through direct access to OpenAI models backed by Azure’s trusted, enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure and tools.
- Exclusive cloud provider – As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services.
Since 2016, Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, serving as the foundation of our vision to democratize AI as a platform. Through our initial investment and collaboration, Microsoft and OpenAI pushed the frontier of cloud supercomputing technology, announcing our first top-5 supercomputer in 2020, and subsequently constructing multiple AI supercomputing systems at massive scale. OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its breakthrough models, which are now deployed in Azure to power category-defining AI products like GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT.
Discussion (4 replies)
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The quality of the art is surprisingly good. Perhaps scarily good.
He did say something about it not working well on AMD gpu’s and had to get the run it on their servers option. Guess it uses cuda?
Didn't know you can locally run it at all. Ive used dall e 2, and the text one (not the one with computer language). Its fun.
Multi billion dollar investment in AI. But still laying off 15k people? Checks out.
Keep in mind that organizations need to be able to teach the ai but also control their own data. Especially if a chat bot as example is involved in any HIPPA data conversations. So the ability to run it on standalone hardware (ish) is important.
Being able to ingest data from specific sources via pulling and polling of external data and merge that with internally generated data streams while not exposing or exporting ant of the internal data externally is important to a good ai setup that enterprise organizations can implement securely.
The cost of the hardware to develop this ai and run it over the cost of manpower to staff for the same tasks is the balancing act. If an ai farm can reliably handle hundreds of chat with human like informed interactions before needing actual human engagement that would be ideal.
The issue is then with customers that specifically want to opt out of AI interaction. For their own moral or privacy concerns.
Would you like to chat with (company name) ai now about your issue or would you rater wait xx minutes for a live agent?