Microsoft said Monday that it is making a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar” investment in OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence lab behind experimental online chatbot ChatGPT.
The companies did not disclose the specific financial terms of the deal, but a person familiar with the matter said Microsoft will invest $10 billion in OpenAI.
Microsoft had already invested more than $3 billion in OpenAI, and the new deal is a clear indication of the importance of OpenAI’s technology to the future of Microsoft and its competition with other big tech companies like Google, Meta and Apple.
With Microsoft’s deep pockets and OpenAI’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence, the companies hope to remain at the forefront of generative artificial intelligence — technologies that can generate text, images and other media in response to short prompts. After its surprise release at the end of November, ChatGPT — a chatbot that answers questions in clear, well-punctuated prose — became the symbol of a new and more powerful wave of AI.
The fruit of more than a decade of research inside companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta, these technologies are poised to remake everything from online search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing to photo and graphics editors like Photoshop.