Microsoft Expands Access to OpenAI’s Tools to More Customers
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT 0.30%
said Monday that it is allowing more customers access to the software behind popular artificial-intelligence tools made by OpenAI.
The startup has been the center of the tech industry’s recent surge in excitement about AI, thanks to its futuristic products such as chatbot ChatGPT, which can answer questions and write essays and poems, and image generator Dall-E 2, which turns language prompts into novel images.
While
Microsoft
MSFT 0.30%
and OpenAI used to limit the number of businesses that had access to the tools, the Azure OpenAI Service will allow any business to apply for access—opening the way for more AI-infused products.
Broadening access to AI tools is the next step in trying to turn the software that has captured the public’s imagination into a potentially big business for Microsoft, OpenAI and others.
Microsoft has invested $1 billion in OpenAI and is in talks to put in even more, The Wall Street Journal previously reported
Microsoft on Monday said in a blog post it won’t allow customers access to build on ChatGPT at first. Instead, it will be offering access to GPT-3.5, as well as Dall-E 2 and a code–writing tool, Codex, which can turn natural language prompts into code. The company said it plans to make ChatGPT available for businesses in the near future.
Microsoft’s vice president of AI platform, Eric Boyd, wrote in the post that the company’s cloud hosting service Azure has been updated for the AI era and, paired with OpenAI’s tools, allows customers to make “cutting-edge applications.”
“With Azure OpenAI Service now generally available, more businesses can apply for access to the most advanced AI models,” Mr. Boyd wrote.
OpenAI’s tools such as GPT-3 have already been popular among some startups. Since being made available in a limited fashion in 2020, companies such as content-creation startup Jasper have licensed GPT-3 to create products that can automatically generate text for websites. Other startups such as Yoodli use GPT-3 for their speech-coaching software.
Microsoft has been working to rebrand itself as the vanguard of the AI revolution and put OpenAI’s tools into its own software. Last year, the company said it was putting Dall-E 2 into its graphic-design tool Microsoft Designer and its search engine Bing as an image generation tool.
In 2021, it released the code writing assistant GitHub co-pilot, which uses OpenAI’s Codex, as part of its popular code coding-collaboration service GitHub.
As the AI industry takes off, there will likely be a battle among the big cloud hosting providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google’s Cloud Platform to be seen as the preferred cloud provider for businesses to build on. OpenAI is one of Azure’s highest-profile AI customers.
Write to Tom Dotan at [email protected]
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