Microsoft is making a $10 billion investment over several years in OpenAI, the creator of the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT that has lit up the internet since its introduction in November, amassing more than a million users within days and touching off a fresh debate over the role of AI in the workplace.
Microsoft, which already plowed $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019 and invested again in 2021, is seeking an inside edge on some of the most popular and advanced artificial intelligence systems as it competes with Alphabet, Amazon.com and Meta Platforms to dominate the fast-growing industry. OpenAI needs Microsoft's funding and cloud-computing power to crunch massive volumes of data and run the increasingly complex models that allow programs like DALL-E to generate realistic images based on a handful of words, and ChatGPT to create astonishingly humanlike conversational text in response to prompts or queries.