Microsoft to expand access to hugely popular OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the past few months, you’ve probably heard ChatGPT, the best dialogue-based artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public by OpenAI. Since its launch on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT has impressed many experts with its writing ability, proficiency in handling complex tasks, and its ease of use. Now, Microsoft is planning to make OpenAI’s technology available to everyone.

Yesterday, Monday Microsoft announced it is widening access to ChatGPT through its Azure OpenAI Service. The tech giant said that OpenAI’s technology, which has so far been available to its cloud-computing customers in a program it called the Azure OpenAI Service, is now generally available.

In a blog post, Eric Boyd, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of AI Platform, said: “Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service as part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to democratizing AI, and ongoing partnership with OpenAI.”

With Azure OpenAI Service now generally available, Microsoft said that more businesses will now be able to gain access to advanced AI models in the world—including GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2 to create cutting-edge applications. “Customers will also be able to access ChatGPT—a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure—through Azure OpenAI Service soon,” Boyd added.

Before its popularity, Microsoft was one of the few companies that saw the potential of OpenAI. In July 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI as part of the effort for the two companies to work together to bring supercomputing technologies.

Rumors are also swirling that the tech giant is about to give $10 billion to OpenAI in exchange to own half of the company. Microsoft is in talks to acquire a 49% stake worth $10 billion in ChatGPT owner OpenAI, Semafor reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. The funding includes other venture capital firms and will push the valuation of the San Francisco-based OpenAI to $29 billion, the report said.

ChatGPT is currently free to use but Altman said the company will at some point charge people to use the chatbot that many said could one day potentially replace humans.

In just five days after its launch, ChatGPT crossed one million users, according to a post by Open AI co-founder Sam Altman. To put that in perspective, it took Netflix 3.5 years, Facebook 10 months, Spotify 5 months, and Instagram 2.5 months to reach the one million users mark.

OpenAI was founded in late 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman as a for-profit startup conducting research in artificial intelligence (AI) with the goal of promoting and developing friendly AI in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole. OpenIA aims to “freely collaborate” with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. Both founders are motivated in part by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence.