Microsoft and popular generative artificial intelligence company OpenAI are pretty public bedfellows following a $10B investment partnership a little over a year ago, and despite their well-known relationship, CEOs Satya Nadella and Sam Altman managed to surprise attendees at the OpenAI DevDay conference opening keynote.
During his opening keynote announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took time out to invite Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to join him on stage to talk about the continuing partnership between the two companies.
Nadella’s time on stage was brief and roughly covered two aspects of their relationship with OpenAI that include how generative AI has helped build out the shape and structure of Azure as well as making the new GPT platforms more accessible.
Altman also plainly asked Nadella what the CEO thought of their burgeoning partnership to which Nadella simply responded with, “[laughter]…we love you guys.”
Since the initial $10B investment into OpenAI back a few years back, Microsoft is reported to have reached up to $13B in total investments with the AI company to help build out its Azure cloud infrastructure as well as entice developers from competing cloud platforms.
With close to 900 attendees at OpenAI’s first in-person developer conference, the company laid out a list of platform and technology upgrades that include the GPT Store, new GPT 4 APIs, GPT 4-Turbo with knowledge of the world as recent as April 2023, massive context windows for up to 120K tokens, copyright shield, cheaper plans, upgrades to DALLE-3, upgrades to the vision and voice modules, and more.
As OpenAI expands its platforms and services, much of this will be back ported into Microsoft’s own offerings that include its Copilot AI in Windows, Office, and Bing as well as showing up as integrated stack solutions in Azure.
Microsoft’s early investment in OpenAI continues to be sound strategy for keeping the company competitive in what many see as the next computing battle outside of the cloud.
