Microsoft to invest in OpenAI: A closer look at the company behind ChatGPT and Dall-E | Technology News,The Indian Express
Microsoft reportedly is in talks to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, taking its value up to $29 billion. But what exactly is the company and why has it shot to such prominence in recent times? Read on to know more.
OpenAI started as a non-profit research organisation in 2015 and its co-founders include Sam Altman (who is the current CEO), Ilya Sutskever (who is the Chief Scientist), Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Wojciech Zaremba, Elon Musk and John Schulman. Musk had initially invested $1 billion in the non-profit. It should be noted that the company is no longer a non-profit and Elon Musk moved on from the company in 2018 to avoid a potential conflict of interest with Tesla.
In 2015, its mission read, “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate a financial return.” OpenAI was pitched as a place to seek “a good outcome for all over its own self-interest,” and to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) does not end up replacing or harming humanity.
The organisation is dedicated to developing AI for the benefit of humanity as a whole. At the very core, its mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence, which is essentially highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work, benefits all of humanity. The company says that it will attempt to directly build a safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider the mission fulfilled if its “work aids others to achieve this outcome.”
In 2019, OpenAI changed its non-profit status to “capped” for-profit, allowing it to rapidly increase investments. At around the same time, the company announced intentions to commercially license its technologies.
Microsoft also made a $1 billion investment in July 2019 as well. It also partnered with the company in 2016 where OpenAI became an early adopter of Microsoft’s “Azure N-Series Virtual Machines.” Keep in mind ChatGPT runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. As of now, the company is reportedly projecting $200 million in revenue for 2023 and $1 billion in revenue for 2024. But keep in mind that running each query on ChatGPT is also costing the company a lot of money.
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