All you need to know about Microsoft and OpenAI's collaboration so far

Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella, who was on a four-day visit to India last week, has said that the company is very excited to work with the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI that launched multiple generative AI tools last year, like DALL.E 2 and ChaptGPT.

Microsoft pumped $1 billion into the AI firm in 2019 as part of the multiyear exclusive computing partnership to achieve the holy grail of AI – artificial general intelligence. With this deal, Microsoft became OpenAI’s ‘preferred partner’ in commercialising the new AI technologies it develops in the future. 

Nadella revealed his intentions during an an interview with Mint last week.

For instance, as per a report by The Information, Microsoft is all set to leverage ChatGPT, a new smart chatbot from OpenAI, in its search engine Bing, and Office apps like Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook. A conversational AI tool, ChatGPTgives humanlike answers to questions, writes poems, and even codes. The tool went ‘viral’ on social media soon after its launch in November 2022, crossing the 1 million users mark in just a week after it was opened to the public.

However, Microsoft has already used many of OpenAI's products in its existing services. Here's how the partnership has worked out so far.

GPT-3

the Generative pretrained transform-3 (GPT-3) platform was introduced by OpenAI in 2020 which could produce ‘human-like’ text based on a prompt. At the time of launch, it was the largest language model with 175 billion parameters making it one of the most powerful AI models in existence. People could write essays, stories, and even movie plots using this large language model.

A few months after its release, Microsoft and OpenAI said that the former will hold the exclusive license to GPT-3 model, allowing it to directly integrate the technology into its products. And soon after, in 2021, Microsoft started integrating GPT-3 in its low-code app development platform Power Apps, allowing users even those with little to no coding knowledge to build apps.

DALL.E

OpenAI released a deep learning model called DALL.E in 2021 to generate images based on natural language prompts. A year later, the organisation released its successor, DALL.E 2, which could produce more accurate, precise images with four times better resolution than its predecessor.

In October 2022, Microsoft announced that DALL.E 2 was coming to Azure OpenAI Service, allowing select Azure AI customers to generate images using text or images. The company also said that the tool will be integrated with Microsoft Designer, a web app to generate designs, to be later expanded to Image Creator product in Microsoft Bing.

GitHub Copilot

An AI coding assistant, GitHub Copilot (launched jointly with Microsoft and OpenAI) automatically suggests completions to the human programmer based on the code being worked on, right in the editor. These code suggestions try to match the project’s context and style conventions; depending on the relevance, human programmers can choose to accept, reject or edit these suggestions, saving them time for more critical tasks. Since its launch in 2021, the use of Copilot has improved programmers' productivity, a GitHub study published in September 2022 said. The study found that programmers using this tool were able to finish their tasks 55% faster than those who didn’t.

GitHub Copilot was introduced in 2021 as an extension for Microsoft Visual Code Studio. In March 2022, GitHub made it available in Visual Studio 2022.

Azure OpenAI

Azure OpenAI service is a fully managed and enterprise-focused product that gives customers access to OpenAI’s technologies with added features. Under this banner, Microsoft allows companies to leverage large-scale models. In 2022, Microsoft expanded the umbrella of services to include additional use cases on a pay-as-you-go basis. Apart from access to GPT-3, customers can now use Codex and other responsible AI tools.