Microsoft Gets Exclusive License For OpenAI's Advanced GPT-3 Language Model

Microsoft has announced that it is expanding its existing partnership with OpenAI with a new exclusive license on the artificial intelligence research company’s GPT-3 language model. This highly advanced language model offers the ability to auto-generate text for apps that is astonishingly as good as done by a human. OpenAI had recently given access to GPT-3 to a small group of developers and it is the largest language model ever trained capable of auto-generating business correspondence, as well as creative work like poetry, or advanced technical tasks like coding.

Microsoft and OpenAI already have an ongoing cloud computing contract, where Microsoft’s Azure is being offered a platform for OpenAI to train its models. Last year Microsoft made an investment of $1 billion to become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. With Microsoft acquiring the exclusive license, the tech giant could make good use of GPT-3 by integrating it into its own products. “We see this as an incredible opportunity to expand our Azure-powered AI platform in a way that democratizes AI technology, enables new products, services and experiences, and increases the positive impact of AI at Scale. Our mission at Microsoft is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, so we want to make sure that this AI platform is available to everyone – researchers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, businesses – to empower their ambitions to create something new and interesting,” Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott said in a blog post announcing the deal.

It is noteworthy that the deal has “no impact on continued access to the GPT-3 model through OpenAI’s API, and existing and future users of it will continue building applications with our API as usual,” as mentioned by OpenAI. As pointed out by The Verge, this could mean that while other companies and researchers can get access to GPT-3, Microsoft will be the one that would get all the benefits as it will get to make use of all the AI advancements that went into making the sophisticated program.