OpenAI and Microsoft have announced an extension of their partnership with a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft. This follows previous investments in 2019 and 2021 and will enable OpenAI to continue its independent research and development of artificial intelligence (AI) that is safe, useful, and powerful.
OpenAI is a capped-profit company that is governed by the OpenAI non-profit. This structure allows the company to raise the necessary capital to fulfill its mission of ensuring advanced AI benefits all of humanity, while also remaining committed to sharing benefits and prioritizing safety. Microsoft shares this vision and values and the partnership is instrumental to progress.
The two companies have worked together to build multiple supercomputing systems powered by Azure, which are used to train all of OpenAI’s models. Azure’s unique architectural design has been crucial in delivering best-in-class performance and scale for AI training and inference workloads. Microsoft will increase its investment in these systems to accelerate independent research and Azure will remain the exclusive cloud provider for all OpenAI workloads across research, API and products.
Learning from real-world use and incorporating those lessons is a critical part of developing powerful AI systems that are safe and useful. To ensure that AI’s benefits can be distributed broadly, OpenAI and Microsoft have partnered to deploy the technology through an API and the Azure OpenAI Service, enabling enterprises and developers to build on top of GPT, DALL·E, and Codex. They have also worked together to integrate OpenAI’s technology into apps such as GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Designer.
To build and deploy safe AI systems, the teams regularly collaborate to review and synthesize shared lessons and use them to inform iterative updates to the systems, future research, and best practices for use of these powerful AI systems across the industry. The companies look forward to continued collaboration and advancing this progress with Microsoft.
