Microsoft to invest more in OpenAI as tech race heats up

Microsoft Corp. announced on Monday that it would increase its investment in OpenAI, the company behind the wildly popular ChatGPT chatbot, and place its future in the technology. This move also paves the way for increased competition with rival Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

Microsoft, which recently asserted that it is revolutionizing artificial intelligence (AI), is building on a wager it placed on OpenAI almost four years ago. It committed $1 billion to the startup in 2019 that Elon Musk and entrepreneur Sam Altman co-founded, and since then, it has built a supercomputer to power OpenAI’s technology in addition to providing other kinds of support.

Microsoft announced the third phase of its partnership with OpenAI in a blog post, stating, “Today, we are announcing the multi-billion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs and widely share these benefits is shared with the world.”

On the terms of the investment, which some media outlets previously reported would be $10 billion, a Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment.

ChatGPT creators OpenAI cast a spell on Microsoft

Microsoft is investing even more resources in “generative AI,” a technology that can learn from big data how to create virtually any type of content from a text prompt, in order to keep both companies at the forefront. One outstanding example that received a lot of attention in Silicon Valley last year was OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates prose or poetry on demand.

As OpenAI continues to develop artificial intelligence that is comparable to human intelligence, Microsoft stated last week that it intends to integrate such AI into all of its products. Bing, a search engine from Microsoft that is already integrating OpenAI’s technology, is being discussed as a potential Google competitor for the first time in years.

The eagerly awaited investment demonstrates how Microsoft is edging closer to competition with Google, the originator of significant AI research, which is now planning its own unveiling for this spring, according to a previous report from Was by a person familiar with the situation.