Microsoft to add ChatGPT to Azure cloud services ‘soon’
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Azure customers will be able to use OpenAI products like ChatGPT in their own applications running in the cloud
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SEATTLE, Washington – Microsoft said it will add OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) bot ChatGPT to its cloud-based Azure service “soon”, building on an existing relationship between the two companies as Microsoft mulls over taking a far larger stake in OpenAI.
The software giant announced the broad availability of its Azure OpenAI Service, which has been available to a limited set of customers since it was unveiled in 2021. The service gives Microsoft’s cloud customers access to various OpenAI tools like the GPT-3.5 language system that ChatGPT is based on, as well as the Dall-E model for generating images from text prompts, the company said in a blog post. That enables Azure customers to use the OpenAI products in their own applications running in the cloud.
Microsoft is in discussions to invest as much as US$10 billion (S$13.2 billion) in OpenAI, sources familiar with its plans said last week. That proposal calls for the software maker to put money in over multiple years, though the final terms may change, the sources said.
News website Semafor last week reported that the potential investment could value OpenAI at about US$29 billion, citing sources familiar with the negotiations. Microsoft and OpenAI representatives have declined to comment on the talks.
Microsoft, already an OpenAI partner thanks to a US$1 billion investment in 2019, is looking to get an inside edge on the most popular and advanced AI systems to boost its own products in competition with Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com and Facebook parent Meta Platforms.
ChatGPT has lit up the Internet since launching at the end of last November, gathering its first million users in less than a week. Its imitation of human conversation sparked speculation about its potential to supplant professional writers and even threaten Google’s core search business. The organisation behind it, co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk and Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman, makes money by charging developers to license its technology.
The new technology comes at the end of a year of headline-grabbing AI advances. OpenAI’s Dall-E – which accepts written prompts to synthesise art and other images – also gave rise to a broad debate about the infusion of AI into creative industries. OpenAI is already working on a successor GPT-4 model for its natural language processing.
Still, concern about its accuracy – which Mr Altman himself has said is not good enough for the bot to be relied on – has prompted caution about its premature use, and New York City schools have banned its students from accessing ChatGPT.
Microsoft is now using OpenAI’s Codex to add automation to its GitHub unit’s Copilot programming tool, and it is adding that feature to Azure along with the other OpenAI tools. The company wants to adopt even more OpenAI technology in its Bing search engine,
