Microsoft Likely to Invest in ChatGPT’s Creator OpenAI

Microsoft is reportedly planning to invest 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, thus bringing its value to 29 billion

IT behemoth Microsoft is reportedly in talks to invest 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, creator of the notorious artificial intelligence chat bot ChatGPT. This new development has been reported by Bloomberg quoting sources familiar with the matter. There is no official confirmation from Microsoft or OpenAI at the moment. The deal has been under discussion for several months now according to the source. This deal will value OpenAI at 29 billion dollars.

Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI last year had thanked Microsoft for making it possible to build ChatGPT. “Microsoft, and particularly azure, don’t get nearly enough credit for the stuff OpenAI launches. They do an amazing amount of work to make it happen; we are deeply grateful for the partnership. They have built by far the best AI infra out there,” he said.

ChatGPT has been creating waves ever since it was made public in November 2022. Although experts have been warning of the possibility of such AI chatbots being used to carry out cyber attacks, Sam Altman says that this is a risk that the world will have to take as we are entering into an era of artificial general intelligence. “The most that OpenAI, or any other company, can do is to steer the AI revolution a little. This will impact all aspects of society, and will be an emergent thing created and shaped by all of us. Much much bigger than any company. Also, once a technological revolution starts, it cannot be stopped. But it can be directed, and we can contintually figure out how to make the new world much better,” he says.

Also read: Is ChatGPT a Boon or Bane? Experts Sound Caution

Altman also adds that the chatbot, built on reinforcement learning and supervised learning, is still under development and is learning from its mistakes. “ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. It's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”

While ChatGPT, which crossed a million users within a month of its launch, is free for now, Altman has made it clear that they will have to monetise the platform somehow. “We will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering,” he says.