Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I.
As a new chatbot wows the world with its conversational talents, a resurgent tech giant is poised to reap the benefits while doubling down on a relationship with the start-up OpenAI.
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Cade Metz and
Cade Metz and Karen Weise reported this story from San Francisco and Seattle.
When a chatbot called ChatGPT hit the internet late last year, executives at a number of Silicon Valley companies worried they were suddenly dealing with new artificial intelligence technology that could disrupt their businesses.
But at Microsoft, it was a cause for celebration. For several years, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, had been putting the pieces in place for this moment.
In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the tiny San Francisco company that designed ChatGPT. And in the years since, it has quietly invested another $2 billion, according to two people familiar with the investment who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
The $3 billion paid for the huge amounts of computing power that OpenAI needed to build the chatbot. And it meant that Microsoft could rapidly build and deploy new products based on the technology.
Microsoft is now poised to challenge Big Tech competitors like Google, Amazon and Apple with a technological advantage the company has not possessed for more than two decades. Microsoft is in talks to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI as it seeks to push its technology even further, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The potential $10 billion deal — which would mainly provide OpenAI with even larger amounts of computing power — has not been finalized and the funding amount could change. But the talks are indicative of the tech giant’s determination to be on the leading edge of what has become the hottest technology in the tech industry.
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