Microsoft says it is making a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment” in the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and generate new images.
The tech giant on Monday described its new agreement as the third stage of a growing partnership with San Francisco-based OpenAI that began with a $1 billion investment in 2019. It didn’t disclose the dollar amount for its latest investment. It’s part of a new generation of machine-learning systems that can converse, generate readable text on demand and produce novel images and video based on what they’ve learned from a vast database of digital books, online writings and other media.
“There’s lots of ways that the models that OpenAI is building would be really appealing for Microsoft’s set of offerings,” said Rowan Curran, an analyst at market research firm Forrester. That could include helping to generate text and images for new slide presentations, or creating smarter word processors, Curran said.
That changed in 2018 when it incorporated a for-profit business Open AI LP, and shifted nearly all its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT model for generating human-like paragraphs of readable text. Musk also left its board in 2018.
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