The future of Microsoft seems to go through OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E. Or at least a part of it. In 2019, the Redmond company invested 1 billion in it. And, for the last few weeks, both parties have been negotiating to bring such services to some of Microsoft’s most popular products – such as Bing, Word or even Outlook. A relationship clearly in crescendo I could take a new – and capital – step: an additional investment of 10,000 million dollars.
According to traffic light, Microsoft has been negotiating with the company behind OpenAI for the past few weeks with that goal. An investment to which other companies would also join and which, if materialized, would value OpenAI at $29 billion. To put the number in context: at this moment, Electronic Arts has a market capitalization of about 34,000 million dollars; Spotify, on the other hand, is hovering around $16 billion.
The information matches what was previously published by The Wall Street Journal Y The Informationwho assured that Microsoft wanted to increase its participation in OpenAI and, also, that the creator of ChatGPT and DALL-E was allowing employees and investors to sell shares taking as reference a valuation of 29,000 million dollars.
Microsoft’s investment, according to traffic lightwould have a complicated structure. The company would keep 75% of the revenue until it recovered its investment. Once done, Microsoft would have 49% of the company, while 2% would be in the hands of the non-profit company OpenAI Inc. and the remaining 49% would be from other investors.
It is unknown whether the negotiations have been finalized and, if they have, what the outcome of them is. Nevertheless, traffic light It does point out that, in documents sent by OpenAI to potential investors, the company stated that its intention was to complete the process by the end of 2022.
2022 has been the year of OpenAI; and for Microsoft it is a golden opportunity
artificial intelligence has lived a particularly sweet year during 2022. Services such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion or Midjourney have dominated the news throughout the year. The ability to create high-quality images just by typing words into a text box or being able to get surprisingly human and content-rich responses from a bot has fascinated users and the tech community alike.
In the specific case of ChatGPT, Many believe it poses the first serious threat to Google’s dominance in more than two decades. in the world of search engines. In fact, the Mountain View company would have activated a kind of red code to respond to this new threat.
For Microsoft, ties with OpenAI represent a golden opportunity.
- On the one hand, to compete with Google in the world of search engines – where Bing never became a key player.
- On the other, it would allow them to improve conventional products such as Outlook or Word.
- And ultimately, it would also help the company position Azure as the benchmark in the world of cloud computing artificial intelligence oriented. A field in which Amazon also competes with AWS and Google Cloud, among others, and which will only grow in the coming years thanks to the unstoppable advance of AI in all areas of life. Therefore, having a strong position in that field can be quite fruitful for Microsoft.