Microsoft invests $10 billion in OpenAI, will ChatGPT join the Office family bucket?

​In the past period, the conversational AI model ChatGPT has become popular throughout the community. It can output haiku, debug code and answer questions while imitating human language, exciting both amateurs and AI experts. Subsequently, OpenAI, which launched it, received more attention.

Recently, according to Semafor and other foreign media citing people familiar with the matter, Microsoft is negotiating to invest US$10 billion in OpenAI. As part of the financing, OpenAI will be valued at $29 billion. The news signals growing interest in the AI ​​company.

The funding may also involve other venture capital firms. It's unclear whether the deal has been finalized, but terms were outlined in documents sent to potential investors in recent weeks with the goal of closing the financing by the end of 2022.

The capital injection from Microsoft is part of a complex deal that will give Microsoft 75% of OpenAI’s profits before recouping its investment. And once that threshold is reached, Microsoft and other investors will each receive 49% of OpenAI, with OpenAI's nonprofit parent company owning the remaining 2%.

Currently, both Microsoft and OpenAI declined requests for comment.

Cash-burning OpenAI is in urgent need of funds

Although ChatGPT is powerful, it is also quite expensive. Previously, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that every time someone uses the chatbot ChatGPT, it consumes about a few cents worth of computing power. This has raised concerns about OpenAI's cash burn.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal last week, OpenAI is negotiating to sell the existing company through a tender offer. shares, valued at $29 billion. This will attract at least $300 million in investment.

Reuters also reported last month that OpenAI has been lobbying investors recently for its profitability prospects and expects revenue to reach $200 million next year and $10 by 2024. One hundred million U.S. dollars.

In addition, to obtain more funding, OpenAI also charges developers who license its technology 1 cent or more to allow the generation of 20,000 words of text, charging about 2 US dollars. to allow the creation of images based on text prompts.

Microsoft wants to flex its muscles with ChatGPT

Microsoft has always been interested in OpenAI and its research. In 2019, Microsoft invested US$1 billion in OpenAI, and its cloud services division also provides the computing power needed for OpenAI.

In 2022, Microsoft unveiled a plan to integrate OpenAI image generation software DALL-E 2 into its search engine Bing. According to a recent report from The Information, as Microsoft wants to challenge Google Search, the leader in the search market, it wants to work hard on ChatGPT.

In early January, Microsoft said it was planning to integrate ChatGPT into Bing, allowing it to directly personalize answers to some user searches, rather than just displaying a list of links as it does now. According to the plan, Microsoft hopes to launch this new feature by the end of March this year.

However, this is not over yet. Recently, there are rumors that Microsoft plans to integrate ChatGPT into its Office productivity program suite. . These applications will include Word, PowerPoint and Excel, combined with powerful chat capabilities that allow text to be generated based on simple prompts provided by the user.

It remains to be seen whether AI will mesh well with applications used by mass users. But it is foreseeable that the functions provided by platforms such as ChatGPT will be greatly improved compared with traditional Office assistants such as Clippit. After all, Clippit can only provide users with basic auxiliary functions.

If Microsoft eventually invests $10 billion in OpenAI, it will be smoother if it wants to use ChatGPT to flex its muscles. ​

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