Microsoft’s longtime collaborator, OpenAI Inc., is looking for more cash from the tech giant.
Rumours are circulating that Microsoft is currently in advanced talks with OpenAI about increasing its investment in the organisation. The amount of funding the group is requesting is unknown. It is also not known what, if anything, OpenAI will give Microsoft in return.
What we do know is that the company is now valued at about $20 billion after the company sold some stock to existing investors in 2021.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, enabling Azure to run the open-source AI provider’s cloud services. Since then, Microsoft has obtained an exclusive l from OpenAI for the GPT-3 API.
Many may see the move as a counter-threat to Google who are ramping up their AI offerings and new competition coming in fast from Stability.Ai and Midjourney who are all gaining traction after DALL-E 2 took generative art mainstream.
The field of artificial intelligence is growing quickly, and IDC experts forecast that in 2026, it will be a $900 billion industry, from there the worldwide industry would expand by an average of 18.6 per cent annually. OpenAI is concentrating on artificial general intelligence (AGI), which aims to develop cognitive skills in software such that an AGI-based system could discover a solution to a challenging intellectual issue in a manner akin to humans.
You can find out more about OpenAi here
If you would like to know more about the Microsoft & OpenAi Collaboration you can visit the Azure site here