There were rumors earlier this month that Microsoft would invest $10 billion in OpenAI.Now Microsoft and OpenAI officially announced that they will expand their partnership with “multi-year, multi-billion dollar” investments to achieve breakthroughs in artificial intelligence faster, but the two sides did notdid not discloseThe specific amount of the investment.

This is also Microsoft’s second investment in OpenAI after 2019 and 2021. This funding will allow OpenAI to continue independent research and develop safe, effective and powerful artificial intelligence.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said:

Our partnership with OpenAI is built around a shared goal of responsibly advancing cutting-edge AI research and democratizing AI as a new technology platform. In the next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchains on Azure to build and run their applications.

OpenAI stated:

We’ve partnered to build multiple Azure-powered supercomputing systems that we use to train all of our models. Azure’s unique architectural design is critical to delivering outstanding performance and scale for our AI training and inference workloads. Microsoft will increase its investment in these systems to accelerate our independent research, and Azure will continue to be the exclusive cloud provider for all OpenAI workloads in our research, APIs, and products.

Although OpenAI has long developed AI tools that can defeat human opponents in games, Dactyl robots that can solve the Rubik’s Cube with one hand, and language models such as GPT-3, ChatGPT, which was unveiled at the end of last year, caused a stir and discussion than previous projects. Both are bigger.

As an in-depth partner of OpenAI, Microsoft also saw the potential of ChatGPT. Before this investment, it announced that it would introduce ChatGPT into Bing, Office, Azure and other services. From a strict point of view, ChatGPT often gives inaccurate answers, but it already has the potential to replace search engines and help users answer various questions, which has even caused Google to worry.

It was previously reported that OpenAI will charge for the ChatGPT service. Now that OpenAI has received billions of dollars in funding, and it is backed by the “golden mountain” of Microsoft, it is not known whether users can continue to use ChatGPT for free. Microsoft has just announced that it will lay off 10,000 employees due to the economic downturn, and its huge investment in OpenAI has also been criticized and complained by Wall Street and Microsoft employees.