Microsoft is stepping up its investment in the artificial intelligence realm, and today announced it is expanding its partnership with OpenAI (opens in new tab). According to Microsoft, this will be the third phase in its tie-up with OpenAI, representing a “multi-billion dollar investment” in its effort to be at the forefront of all things AI.

“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”

From now on, Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure will be used exclusively to power OpenAI workloads, API services, research, and backend systems. Microsoft will also use OpenAI to enhance its products to create “new categories of digital experiences.” Those experiences will leverage OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a conversational AI routine that can be used to write articles, poetry, and even debug code. 

The Information (opens in new tab) reported earlier this month that Microsoft planned to fuse ChatGPT with its Bing search engine to become more competitive with Google (or, more specifically, the Google Knowledge Graph). Perhaps even more interesting is the rumor that claims Microsoft intends to bring the GPT text-generation model to Microsoft Word and Outlook. This would potentially let AI write emails for you based on input commands, or flesh out an article you’re writing using information siphoned from the web. 

On that note, we used ChatGPT (using the GPT-3 language model) last week to inquire about how to build a PC. Unfortunately, despite ChatGPT’s impressive capabilities, its advice on building a PC turned out to be pretty bad. Its instructions were grammatically correct, but would have likely resulted in the destruction of the CPU if followed by a tech neophyte. 

Microsoft’s investment in AI should not come as a surprise to anyone. When Nadella announced that the company would lay off 10,000 employees this year, he noted that “the next major wave of computing is being born with advances in AI, as we’re turning the world’s most advanced models into a new computing platform.” 

OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by a group of tech luminaries, including Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. Its mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” and the company’s continued partnership with Microsoft will hopefully advance those efforts. 

“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Altman, who serves as OpenAI’s CEO. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”