Microsoft invests 10,000 million in OpenAI, creator of artificial intelligence ChatGPT

Microsoft has confirmed what was expected. The technology giant has confirmed this Monday that it will invest “billions of dollars” to expand its alliance with Open AIthe research company in Artificial intelligence (AI) that has created the popular tools ChatGPT Y DALL-E 2.

Although the computer multinational has not specified the amount, the officialization of this association comes two weeks after the American media ‘Semafor’ encrypted that investment at 10 billion dollars. A source familiar with the negotiations has confirmed to ‘Bloomberg‘ that figure. If so, that could raise OpenAI’s stock market valuation to around 29,000 million dollars (26,710 million euros).

In a release on his website, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadellahas remarked that this alliance is due to the “shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge research in AI and democratize AI as a new technological platform”.

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In other words, Microsoft sees OpenAI as an essential ally to position the company in the emerging AI market, a market that is aiming for million-dollar figures and marking innovation in the sector in the next decade. The ChatGPT text generator and the DALL-E image generator, both systems capable of creating based on users’ written requests, have become a sensation, arousing the interest of millions of people, not without also causing some problems.

It is this desire to get ahead of its competitors, such as Alphabet (parent of Google), Amazon either Goal (parent company of Facebook and Instagram), which has led Microsoft to plant the flag in OpenAI and to study the integration of the ChatGPT chatbot in a new version of Bing, your web browser. Likewise, Microsoft will also use the alliance to continue in the development of systems of supercomputing and will integrate OpenAI developments into other of its services.

Microsoft has been following OpenAI closely for some time. In 2019, the computer giant invested 1,000 million dollars (about 921 million euros) in this prolific research laboratory founded by businessmen sam altman Y Elon Musk, who is no longer part of its board. In 2021, this investment was expanded, key to the development of advanced technologies.

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The alliance also makes sense from an OpenAI point of view. And it is that, in order to generate all kinds of images and texts, the company’s AI systems require a high power of computing, a very expensive process. Microsoft can provide both its funding and its cloud services, capable of storing the billions of pieces of data with which these systems are trained.

Microsoft last week announced a series of measures, including the layoff of some 10,000 employees, to deal with inflation, interest rate hikes and other macroeconomic turmoil that have hit its business and much of the technology sector. Even so, the giant made it clear that one of its priorities is to continue promoting AI systems to make them more accessible to all kinds of industries. The alliance with OpenAI will be key to trying to achieve that goal.