Microsoft is in discussions to invest as much as US$10 billion in OpenAI, people familiar with its plans said last week. That proposal calls for the Redmond, Washington-based software maker, to put money in over multiple years, though the final terms may change, the people said, asking not to be named discussing a private matter. Semafor last week reported that the potential investment could value OpenAI at about US$29 billion, citing people familiar with the negotiations. Microsoft and OpenAI representatives have declined to comment on the talks.
Microsoft Corp. said it will add OpenAI’s viral artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT to its cloud-based Azure service “soon,” building on an existing relationship between the two companies as Microsoft mulls taking a far larger stake in OpenAI.
The software giant announced the broad availability of its Azure OpenAI Service, which has been available to a limited set of customers since it was unveiled in 2021. The service gives Microsoft's cloud customers access to various OpenAI tools like the GPT-3.5 language system that ChatGPT is based on, as well as the Dall-E model for generating images from text prompts, the company said in a blog post. That enables Azure customers to use the OpenAI products in their own applications running in the cloud.
