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Microsoft confirms ‘multi-billion dollar’ investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI

2023-02-01
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Microsoft is extending its partnership with OpenAI, the company behind the GPT-3 large language artificial intelligence model (LLM) and the ChatGPT chatbot. The deal, which will see MSFT invest a reported $10bn, will see the tech giant develop supercomputers which can be used to train OpenAI’s models, and will enable more of the company’s products to be available across Microsoft’s business and consumer portfolios. Microsoft Azure will remain OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider as part of the agreement.

Microsoft has confirmed a multi-billion dollar investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI. (Photo by Ascannio/iStock)

Reports of Microsoft increasing its stake in OpenAI have been circulating for several weeks. The company has not confirmed the size of its investment, announced today, only saying that it is a “multi-billion dollar” cash injection, though several reports have put the figure at $10bn, citing sources familiar with the negotiations.

“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratise AI as a new technology platform,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organisations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”

News of the massive investment in OpenAI comes days after Microsoft revealed it was making 10,000 staff redundant around the world.

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Microsoft OpenAI partnership extends collaboration

Microsoft first invested $1bn in OpenAI three years ago. Since then the company has grown in prominence thanks largely to the power of its GPT-3 LLM model, which is capable of producing complex and accurate text.

OpenAI has built several tools which harness the power of its AI research, most notably ChatGPT, the conversational AI chatbot which has gone viral since it was launched before Christmas. It allows users to ask it simple questions, from which it can generate all sorts of prose. Many businesses are already looking at ways to incorporate it into their workflows, while fears have been raised that it could be used to write essays and generate malware for cybercriminals. ChatGPT is currently in what is termed “research preview”, but OpenAI is looking for ways to monetise the system with a professional user tier.

As well as ChatGPT, OpenAI runs DALL-E, an AI-powered image generator, and Codex, which can write snippets of code for developers. Last week it was announced many of the company’s tools would be available to Azure customers as part of the general release of the Azure OpenAI Service, and today’s announcement says “Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.”

It adds that: “Microsoft will increase our investments in the development and deployment of specialised supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research. We will also continue to build out Azure’s leading AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale.”

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Investment boosts OpenAI as it looks to GPT-4

OpenAI will be able to expand its research as part of the partnership. The company already working on a successor to GPT-3, the imaginatively named GPT-4, with speculation suggesting it might have up to 100 trillion parameters, a figure which would make it exponentially more powerful than GPT-3 and its 175 billion parameters.

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The company’s CEO Sam Altman called for calm last week, saying those hyping up GPT-4 are “begging to be disappointed”, and adding that the company would only release the model when it was deemed safe to do so. Previous incarnations of GPT have been delayed due to their ability to produce hate speech and fake news, though OpenAI says it has since introduced safeguards to prevent this.

Of today’s announcement, Altman said: The past three years of our partnership have been great. Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”

Read more: ChatGPT-built hacking tools found in the wild

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参考译文
微软确认向ChatGPT制造商OpenAI投资数十亿美元
微软正在扩大与OpenAI的合作伙伴关系,OpenAI是GPT-3大语言人工智能模型(LLM)和ChatGPT聊天机器人的背后公司。据报道,微软将在这笔交易中投资100亿美元,届时这家科技巨头将开发出可用于训练OpenAI模型的超级计算机,并将使微软的企业和消费者产品组合中有更多该公司的产品。作为协议的一部分,微软Azure仍将是OpenAI的独家云提供商。关于微软增持OpenAI股份的报道已经流传了几周。该公司并未证实其今日宣布的投资规模,只是说这是“数十亿美元”的现金注入,尽管多家报道援引熟悉谈判的消息人士的话称,这一数字为100亿美元。微软董事长兼首席执行官萨蒂亚·纳德拉(Satya Nadella)表示:“我们与OpenAI建立了合作伙伴关系,围绕着一个共同的目标,即负责任地推进前沿人工智能研究,并将人工智能作为一个新的技术平台民主化。”“在我们合作的下一阶段,各行业的开发人员和组织将通过Azure获得最好的人工智能基础设施、模型和工具链,以构建和运行他们的应用程序。”在对OpenAI进行大规模投资的消息传出几天前,微软宣布将在全球裁员1万人。三年前,微软首次向OpenAI投资10亿美元。从那时起,该公司在很大程度上得益于其GPT-3 LLM模型的强大功能,该模型能够生成复杂而准确的文本。OpenAI已经开发了几个利用其人工智能研究力量的工具,最著名的是ChatGPT,这是一款对话式人工智能聊天机器人,自圣诞节前推出以来就迅速走红。它允许用户问一些简单的问题,然后生成各种各样的散文。许多企业已经在想方设法将其纳入工作流程,同时也有人担心,它可能被用于撰写论文,并为网络犯罪分子生成恶意软件。ChatGPT目前处于所谓的“研究预览”阶段,但OpenAI正在寻找通过专业用户层将该系统货币化的方法。除了ChatGPT, OpenAI还运行DALL-E(一种人工智能驱动的图像生成器)和Codex(可以为开发人员编写代码片段)。上周,微软宣布,作为Azure OpenAI服务总体发布的一部分,该公司的许多工具将向Azure客户提供。今天的声明称,“微软将在我们的消费者和企业产品中部署OpenAI的模型,并引入基于OpenAI技术的新类别的数字体验。”它补充说:“微软将增加我们在专业超级计算系统的开发和部署方面的投资,以加速OpenAI开创性的独立人工智能研究。我们还将继续构建Azure领先的人工智能基础设施,帮助客户在全球范围内构建和部署他们的人工智能应用程序。“作为合作伙伴关系的一部分,OpenAI将能够扩大其研究。该公司已经在研究GPT-3的继任者,即富有想象力的GPT-4,据推测,它可能拥有多达100万亿个参数,这一数字将使其比GPT-3的1750亿个参数强大得多。该公司首席执行官萨姆·奥特曼上周呼吁保持冷静,称那些炒作GPT-4的人是在“祈求失望”,并补充说,该公司只会在被认为安全的情况下发布这款车型。之前的GPT版本由于能够产生仇恨言论和假新闻而被推迟,不过OpenAI表示,他们已经引入了防范措施来防止这种情况发生。 对于今天的宣布,奥特曼说:“过去三年我们的合作关系非常好。微软分享我们的价值观,我们很高兴继续我们的独立研究,致力于创造先进的人工智能,造福所有人。”
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