According to people familiar with the company's plans, Microsoft Corp. is in discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence bot.
Although the final terms may change, the proposal under consideration calls for the Redmond, Washington-based software giant to invest the money over a number of years, the sources said, declining to be identified because they were discussing a private matter. The merger has been under discussion between the two businesses for months, they added.
Semafor previously reported, citing sources involved with the discussions, that the potential investment would involve additional venture firms and potentially place a valuation on OpenAI of around $29 billion. It stated that documents provided to investors have set a closure date of the deal for the end of 2022. Representatives from Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment.
Since its release at the end of November, ChatGPT has exploded into the internet, gaining its first million users in less than a week. Speculation over its potential to displace freelance writers and perhaps endanger Google's main search operation was spurred by its approximation of human conversation. Elon Musk and Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman co-founded the company that's behind it, and it makes revenue by charging developers to license its technology.
The new technology, which follows a year of headline advances in AI, is based on OpenAI's GPT-3 language model. The company's Dall-E image-generating model, which uses written instructions to create artwork and other pictures, also sparked a heated discussion regarding the integration of AI into the creative industries. A GPT-4 replacement model for OpenAI's natural language processing is already under development.
The accuracy of ChatGPT has raised questions, however, and Altman himself has stated that it is not reliable enough for the bot to be used. As a result, New York City schools have banned their students from using ChatGPT.