Microsoft adds ChatGPT

Microsoft Corp. has announced that it will soon add OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence bot, ChatGPT, to its cloud-based Azure service. This move builds on an existing relationship between the two companies, as Microsoft is reportedly in discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, which could value the company at around $29 billion. The potential investment is said to be spread over multiple years, though the final terms may change. Both Microsoft and OpenAI have declined to comment on the talks.

The Azure OpenAI Service, which has been available to a limited set of customers since it was unveiled in 2021, will now be made broadly available. The service gives Microsoft’s cloud customers access to various OpenAI tools, such as the GPT-3.5 language system that ChatGPT is based on, as well as the Dall-E model for generating images from text prompts. This will enable Azure customers to use OpenAI products in their own applications running in the cloud.

Microsoft is looking to gain an edge on the most popular and advanced AI systems in order to boost its own products in competition with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., and Meta Platforms Inc. The company is already using OpenAI’s Codex to add automation to its GitHub unit’s Copilot programming tool, and plans to add that feature to Azure along with other OpenAI tools. Microsoft is also looking to adopt more OpenAI technology in its Bing search engine, Office productivity applications, Teams chat program, and security software.

Since its launch at the end of November, ChatGPT has gained widespread attention for its ability to imitate human conversation. However, concerns about its accuracy have prompted caution about its premature use, and New York City schools have banned its students from accessing ChatGPT. OpenAI is already working on a successor GPT-4 model for its natural language processing.