Microsoft to Invest $10 Billion in OpenAI, the Creator of ChatGPT

A year later, Microsoft invested a billion dollars in the company; over the next few years, it quietly invested another $2 billion. These funds paid for the enormous amounts of computing power needed to build the kind of generative A.I. technologies OpenAI is known for.

OpenAI is also in talks to complete a deal in which it would sell existing shares in a so-called tender offer. This could total $300 million, depending on how many employees agree to sell their stock, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, and would value the company at around $29 billion.

In 2020, OpenAI built a milestone A.I. system called GPT-3 that could generate text on its own, including tweets, blog posts, news articles and even computer code. Last year, it unveiled DALL-E, which lets anyone generate photorealistic images simply by describing what they want to see.

Based on the same technology as GPT-3, ChatGPT showed the general public just how powerful this kind of technology could be. More than a million people tested the chatbot during its first few days online, using it to answer trivia questions, explain ideas and generate everything from poetry to term papers.

Microsoft has already incorporated GPT-3, DALL-E and other OpenAI technologies into its products. Most notably, GitHub, a popular online service for programmers owned by Microsoft, offers a tool called Copilot that can automatically generate snippets of computer code.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/business/microsoft-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence.html