The news follows previous investments Microsoft made in OpenAI, in 2019 and 2021, and expands the company’s ongoing collaboration across supercomputing and AI research. The extended collaboration covers the following areas.
“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” said Satya Nadella, President – CEO of Microsoft.
“In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across all industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”
The first is large-scale supercomputing. Specifically, Microsoft will increase investment in the development and deployment of supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI AI research. The company will also continue to develop Azure’s AI infrastructure to enable customers to build and deploy their AI applications at scale.
The other area of focus is new AI-based experiences. Microsoft will deploy OpenAI models in its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences based on OpenAI technology.
Finally, as OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads in API research, products and services.
“The last 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 to create advanced AI that benefits everyone.
To date, Microsoft and OpenAI have announced their first top 5 supercomputers in 2020, and have subsequently built several large-scale AI supercomputing systems. OpenAI 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 establishes a framework for the safe deployment of AI technologies.