Microsoft said Monday that it intends to increase its investment in OpenAI by several billion dollars over a number of years in order to expand the partnership.
“We formed our partnership with (OpenAI) around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement, reports Al-Rai daily.
Nadella added that in this next phase of the partnership, developers and organizations across industries will be able to access the best models, toolchain and AI infrastructure with Azure to build and run their applications.
Microsoft said it will increase its investment in deploying specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s AI research and integrate OpenAI’s AI systems into its products while “delivering new classes of digital experiences.”
OpenAI said the new investment will be used to continue its independent research and development of AI that is “safe, useful and robust”. Microsoft and OpenAI have cooperated closely in recent years.
In 2019, Microsoft announced that it would invest $1 billion to jointly develop new technologies for the Azure platform and expand OpenAI’s large-scale AI capabilities.
A year later, Microsoft revealed that it was building a supercomputer hosted on Azure and co-designed with OpenAI.
And in 2021, Microsoft launched Azure OpenAI, an offering designed to give organizations access to OpenAI’s artificial intelligence systems.
Microsoft is also a major backer of OpenAI’s startup fund. Its Azure cloud platform will continue to be the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI.
“The past three years of our partnership have been incredible,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a press release.