🤖 #52: Microsoft & OpenAI get more serious 🔥

Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, founder of AI For Anyone, and I’ll be sharing with you the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

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Microsoft and OpenAI get more serious

It feels like yesterday that we talked about the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI...and that's because it was.

Over the past few days, rumors have intensified of an increasingly deeper collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI.

As a primer, here's a brief timeline of the OpenAI / Microsoft relationship:

• July 2019 - Microsoft invests $1bn in cash and cloud credits into OpenAI for the purposes of "creating new AI technologies and delivering on the promise of artificial general intelligence"

• June 2021 - Github (owned by Microsoft) releases Copilot, an AI coding assistant that uses OpenAI technologies

• October 2022 - Microsoft integrates OpenAI's DALL-E into Bing search engine

• Two days ago - rumors that Microsoft will soon incorporate

• Today - rumors that Microsoft will invest an additional $10bn into OpenAI, in exchange for 45% stake and 75% of profits

Although nothing is confirmed, here are the details of the investment, according to the rumormill:

• MSFT investing (along with other venture firms) at $29bn valuation

• MSFT gets 75% of OpenAI's profits until they recoup $10bn

• After recouping $10bn, ownership structure will change to:

  • MSFT: 49%

  • Other investors: 49%

  • OpenAI nonprofit parent: 2%

If Microsoft's initial $1bn investment into OpenAI was a promise ring of sorts, a $10bn investment is more like an engagement ring.

The two organizations are clearly happy with how the partnership is progressing, and the timing for an additional investment round couldn't be any better:

Although nothing is confirmed, a deeper collaboration between OpenAI should be exciting (and slightly terrifying?).

With additional capital and access to Microsoft's compute resources, the rate of progress we can expect to see from OpenAI will likely increase drastically.

ChatGPT and DALL-E were just the beginning.

(I have a feeling we'll hear more about this before EOW. Watch this space.)

Favorite Reads

• Everything Everywhere All At Once: The Explosion in Generative AI (article link)

  • Rex is one of my favorite "thought-leaders" in tech. In his latest newsletter issue, he discusses the "explosion in innovation" in generative AI since 2022. He breaks down the two (general) use cases for generative AI: 1/ creativity and 2/ productivity. Highly recommend checking this out and subscribing to Rex's newsletter.

• Why AI is not a moat (article link)

  • A must-read for anyone building in the generative AI space. The author discusses that AI is not a moat for new startups, and instead, should tightly scoped and there must be enough data to deliver the desired outcomes.

• GPT and my own career trajectory (article link)

  • Professor of Economics at George Mason University journals how he plans to adapt to the proliferation of tech like ChatGPT

New Tools

• Prezo.ai - use AI to make presentations (Twitter thread link)

• Neeva - search engine with a ChatGPT-like interface, but with references (Twitter thread link)

• PromptLayer - a platform for prompt engineering (Twitter thread link)

• Buildt - Google for your codebase (Twitter thread link)

Tweet of the day

c/o the Twitter meme king @TrungTPhan. May have to add another door to the picture for all the generative AI startups that Microsoft will wipe out. 😬

And that does it for this week’s issue.

As always, thanks for reading, and see you next time. ✌️

- Haroon - (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter

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