Microsoft and OpenAI are looking to formalize their ongoing technical relationship with a potential $10 billion dollar investment in the hot commodity ChatGPT.
As The Scoop reports, people familiar with the deal have seen documents sent to investors outlining terms for a $29 billion round of funding from several venture firms that includes a substantial $10 billion dollar stake from Microsoft for the artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT.
As of this reporting, there has yet to be an official deal to be signed by any party despite several documents indicating a desire to close by 2022. Barring any outstanding last-minute negotiations on the proposed deal, Microsoft would retain 75% of OpenAI's profits on projects until it can recoup the initial investment; at which time Microsoft would retain a 49% stake of OpenAI and more diversified ownership with other investors gaining control of the other 49% collectively, and OpenAI's non-profit business collecting on the remaining 2% of the pie.
Microsoft's potential $10 billion investment in the relatively nascent AI chatbot may seem outsized for a technology that has yet to find monetization pathway, but the company has been working with OpenAI on other artificially intelligent projects before and clearly sees benefit in the results.
While ChatGPT is the latest headline grabbing technology on the market, Microsoft has been working with OpenAI for some time on several other projects, the most recent one to bear fruit being the controversial GitHub community leveraging Copilot platform.
Copilot is a newly released AI powered code assistant that leverages GitHub's developer community to auto populate artificially generated code based on natural language queries.
Recently, Microsoft released the platform to the general public for a nominal monthly $19 subscription fee and introduced new features weeks later that include voice dictation similarly functioning like interacting with Siri or Alexa digital assistance.
It should be noted that Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are facing a class action lawsuit from Joseph Saveri Law firm on behalf of Matthew Butterick, a developer and lawyer. According to the pending suit, Microsoft is in violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act and DCMA 1202 by using a set of 11 popular open-source licenses to power Copilot.
Presumably, Microsoft's $10 billion investment into OpenAI has a bit more to do with all of its AI projects and ChatGPT may just be the opening the company is capitalizing on to formalize a potentially expansive partnership that will help it compete with companies such as Google in embedding its own products with top-tier artificially intelligent experiences.