Microsoft and OpenAI Extend Partnership to Accelerate AI Development

Microsoft announced the third phase of its multi-year partnership with OpenAI, which has been going strong since 2019. 

The new investment and commitment between the companies say to focus on impulsing the breakthrough of safe, useful, and powerful AI applications for the general public, including the latest OpenAI’s generative models like ChatGPT, Dall-E 2, and Github Copilot, among others. 

Microsoft + OpenAI’s Ongoing Collab on AI Development

When announcing the extension of their multi-billion, multi-year partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft has taken the chance to recap and highlight the main points of the two firms’ ongoing teaming and the plans for the inaugurated third phase: 

Shared goals and standards

Both companies believe in the democratization of AI technology, and their collaboration pushes to give developers and users access to state-of-the-art AI models to build and deploy cutting-edge tools at a large scale. 

Autonomy of knowledge is also crucial for the pair, and Microsoft’s investments are used precisely to fuel OpenAI’s independent research. 

And they both value an ethical and safe approach to AI that ensures trustworthy and safe products and serve as an industry standard for responsible AI development. 

Azure-Powered AI Training 

In the past two years, OpenAI has relied on Azure –Microsoft’s cloud computing platform– to build supercomputing systems that helped handle the training of their AI models and scale their workflow from research to API to products. Azure remains OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. 

Joint Efforts in AI Tools

The two firms have already developed interesting AI-powered tools that intend to help end users in their endeavors, such as Microsoft Designer (based on text-to-image generator Dall-E 2) and Github Copilot (powered by text-to-coding feature Codex). 

NEW: AI Consumer Products Azure OpenAI Service

OpenAI’s breakthrough AI models, including Dall-E 2, Codex, and the increasingly popular conversational bot ChatGPT, are available on Azure OpenAI Service for enterprises and developers to deploy new consumer products and useful applications on top of them. 

This will broaden the reach of the latest AI technology from OpenAI to the public and help the companies understand and improve their native models from developer and user experience. 

The Road to AI Development is Only Starting for Microsoft and OpenAI

That’s what we can tell for sure from their latest announcement. The two firms have been collaborating since 2019; as you can see, it’s proven to be a fruitful partnership.

They have clear goals for the upcoming year and are already working full throttle to achieve them. 

We keep saying it, and it stays true: these are exciting times in AI tech!

THE AUTHOR

Ivanna Attie

All About Ivanna

I am an experienced author with expertise in digital communication, stock media, design, and creative tools. I have closely followed and reported on AI developments in this field since its early days. I have gained valuable industry insight through my work with leading digital media professionals since 2014.

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