The deep relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, dates back to 2019. After Microsoft invested heavily in OpenAI, it added the company’s artificial intelligence technologies and models, especially the Bing search engine, to its services. It seems OpenAI thinks Microsoft is in a hurry.OpenAI warns Microsoft
According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI warned Microsoft earlier this year that it was in a hurry to integrate GPT-4 into Bing. Although Microsoft was still integrating at the time, OpenAI was proven right when early users noticed “unstable” behavior in the Bing AI tool. Additionally, the new report details the companies’ “conflict and confusion” behind the scenes of a working but potentially fragile partnership.
Instead of buying OpenAI outright, Microsoft had a clever strategy to avoid regulatory scrutiny and invested a 49 percent stake in the company. The deal gives Microsoft early access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to power its Bing search engine. In addition, Microsoft is adding OpenAI-powered CoPilot to its Office and other software products as it struggles to catch up with rival Google. OpenAI, on the other hand, leverages Microsoft’s financial strength and servers.
“open relationship”
The WSJ describes the agreement as an “open relationship” in which Microsoft has significant influence without full control. For example, although the deal limits OpenAI’s search engine customers, it’s still free to work with Microsoft’s competitors. It is stated that OpenAI and Microsoft can sell services to similar or even the same customers, and a crisis may occur in this scenario. The report also reported that Microsoft employees were surprised that OpenAI was able to release ChatGPT so quickly. Microsoft had released the new Bing months after ChatGPT.Despite Bing’s shaky AI launch, it’s hard to argue that Microsoft didn’t benefit greatly from the partnership. The search engine saw a 15 percent traffic increase after adding the GPT integration, while the Bing mobile app was downloaded 750,000 times in its first week, including 150,000 daily installs.
“We help [OpenAI] when we grow, it helps us when they grow,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said in April. Still, some analysts think this partnership could create problems over time. Because the boundaries of the agreement are not very sharp and conflicts of interest may arise.
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