Microsoft is looking to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, the company that created the popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.
This is according to Semafor, which claims that Microsoft is “in talks” to invest at a valuation of $29 billion, citing people familiar with the matter.
According to the report, the funding would include other venture firms. It’s unclear whether this has been finalized, though the plan was reportedly to close the deal by the end of 2022.
The deal is a complex one, and it includes Microsoft getting 75 percent of OpenAi’s profits until it makes its money back. After that, Microsoft would end up owning a 49 percent stake in Open AI, the other investors would get another 49 percent, and OpenAI’s non-profit parent company would end up with a 2 percent ownership.
Microsoft already owns a chunk of OpenAI, and a report from The Information, dated Oct. 2022, said that OpenAI is looking to raise more funding from Microsoft. And a recent report said that Microsoft is looking to enrich its search engine Bing with ChatGPT.
None of this has surely passed unnoticed by Google, which dominates the search engine space with a 90 percent market share. The New York Times reported in Dec 2022 that Google, which is working on chatbots of its own, considers ChatGPT to be a serious threat to its own business.
OpenAI is also behind DALL-E, an AI-based app which can generate photorealistic images based on text prompts. The company is also working on a number of other tools, including Point-E, which can create 3D objects based on a simple text input.
As for ChatGPT, its popularity appears to still be on the rise, with people coming up with new ways to use the bot every day. This includes students using it to conjure essays for school assignments, and hackers building malware with ChatGPT’s help. Most recently, the folks from Vixus asked ChatGPT to write a Sherlock Holmes mystery, with mixed results.
