Microsoft in talks to invest $10 billions in ChatGPT

Microsoft is reportedly considering investing $10 billion in OpenAI as it plans to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing web search engine and Office products.

Rumors that Microsoft wants to pour more money into the San Francisco-based startup, beyond the $1 billion it pledged in 2019, have been circulating for months. The latest reports whisper that the company is ready to pour $10 billion into a new funding round for OpenAI that includes other investors, which would value the startup at $29 billion.

Under the announced deal, Microsoft will collect 75% of OpenAI’s earnings until it recovers its initial $10 billion investment. After recovering that amount, Microsoft will then take a 49% stake in the company, with other investors splitting the remaining 49%, while OpenAI’s non-profit parent company will receive the remaining 2%. . The rate of return is said to be limited, meaning that there is a maximum amount that each investor can expect to earn from their profits. It’s not clear what that limit is, and the terms and conditions of the deal could change as negotiations continue.

It looks like an acquisition with additional steps. Or make us wonder what is stopping Redmond from devouring the AI ​​lab.

OpenAI is at the forefront of general AI and is the first to release large language models capable of writing text and code, as well as text-to-image systems for creating digital artworks. . Last year, it released two popular apps:
DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT. Microsoft has integrated DALL-E 2 into several of its products, including Designer, a graphic design application, and will be interested in using ChatGPT to improve its Bing search engine. In theory, ChatGPT could help users respond to Bing queries more efficiently, giving Redmond’s search engine a much-needed boost over Google. Instead of typing a query into Google, just imagine requesting a ChatGPT, instead being given the latest information and links and instantly get the information you need.

However, the main technical obstacle to this is that language model like ChatGPT are unreliable and tend to produce unrealistically inaccurate output. Still, the potential possibilities are enough to make some Google executives fear that ChatGPT-powered Bing will challenge their own search engine.

According to the report, Microsoft also wants to include ChatGPT functionality in some of its other Office products, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Templates will help users create and edit their text in emails and documents.

OpenAI and Microsoft have had a close working relationship for many years. In 2020, Microsoft announced that they had reached an agreement with the startup to exclusively license their GPT-3 models, which then led to the AI ​​code pair programming tool GitHub Copilot. Meanwhile, OpenAI is a major customer for its Azure cloud computing platform and has access to a custom AI supercomputer cluster with “more than 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs”.