The news follows previous investments made by Microsoft in OpenAI, in 2019 and 2021, and extends the company's ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research. The extended collaboration spans the following areas.
“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 of Microsoft.
“In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”
The first is supercomputing at scale. Specifically, Microsoft will increase its investments in the development and deployment of supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s AI research. The company will also continue to build out Azure’s AI infrastructure to enable customers build and deploy their AI applications at scale.
The other focus area is new AI-powered experiences. Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.
Lastly, as OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services.
“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”
To date, Microsoft and OpenAI have announced its first top-5 supercomputer in 2020, and subsequently constructed multiple AI supercomputing systems at scale. OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its models, which are now deployed in Azure to power its AI products like GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT.
In addition, OpenAI’s research on AI Alignment and Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard establish a framework for the safe deployment AI technologies.
