Confirming the recent rumors Microsoft and OpenAI officially announced that they are expanding their (already close) partnership. From Microsoft’s announcement:
Today, we are announcing the third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world.
This agreement follows our previous investments in 2019 and 2021. It extends our ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.
In pursuit of our mission to ensure advanced AI benefits all of humanity, OpenAI remains a capped-profit company and is governed by the OpenAI non-profit. This structure allows us to raise the capital we need to fulfill our mission without sacrificing our core beliefs about broadly sharing benefits and the need to prioritize safety.
Microsoft shares this vision and our values, and our partnership is instrumental to our progress.
I am not sure Microsoft has received all of the credit they deserve from how strategically smart their OpenAI partnership is. Microsoft gets to reap the rewards from OpenAI’s advances while maintaining the ability to easily distance itself from the partnership in the event of any future controversies. Google doesn’t have that luxury and will therefore likely move much more slowly, fearing reputational risks if they get anything wrong.