Microsoft’s ongoing partnership with San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research company OpenAI now includes a new exclusive license on the AI firm’s groundbreaking GPT-3 language model, an auto-generating text program that’s emerged as the most sophisticated of its kind in the industry.
The two companies have been entwined for years through OpenAI’s use of the Azure cloud computing platform, with Azure being how OpenAI accesses the vast computing resources it needs to train many of its models. Last year, Microsoft made a major $1 billion investment to become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, a deal that now involves being the exclusive licensee for GPT-3.
OpenAI says, “the deal has no impact on continued access to the GPT-3 model through OpenAI’s API, and existing and future users of it will continue building applications with our API as usual,” which does raise some interesting questions about what exactly Microsoft has acquired here.
