Microsoft Licenses OpenAI’s Ginormous GPT-3 Language Model

In an attempt to expand their ongoing partnership with AI company, Open AI, Microsoft recently acquired an exclusive license of the massive GPT-3 language model. GPT-3, which was launched in May 2020 by Open AI, has been a state-of-the-art auto regressive language model that will now help Microsoft in developing and delivering advanced AI solutions to their customers. The company is aiming to harness the extraordinary power of advanced natural language generation to expand its portfolio of offerings.

Microsoft has already been with OpenAI’s Azure AI supercomputing technologies to launch the most powerful custom-designed supercomputer for training OpenAI’s equally massive AI models. The supercomputer, designed by OpenAI along with Microsoft, would contain over 285,000 processor cores, 10,000 graphics cards, and 400 gigabits per second of connectivity for the GPU servers -- claims to be the fifth most powerful machine in the world. 

And now the company is expanding partnership with OpenAI’s research by licensing to GPT-3. According to the company’s blog post, the company sees this as an incredible opportunity to expand its Azure-powered AI platform to democratise AI technology and extend its products and services portfolio along with their user experiences. “Our mission is to make sure that this AI platform is available to everyone — researchers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists and businesses — to empower their ambitions to create something new and interesting,” stated Kevin Scott - Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft in the blog post.

The company sees immense potential with OpenAI’s GPT-3, most of which haven’t been imagined yet — starting from directly helping humans with their creativity in writing and compositions to describing and summarising large blocks of long-form data, including code. The company is also aiming to convert natural language to another language for creating immense possibilities.

Having said that, this deal will have no impact on the GPT-3 access through OpenAI’s API for users, who can continue building applications with the API given, stated OpenAI on their blog post.

According to OpenAI’s blog post — unlike most artificial intelligence systems that are designed for a specific use-case, OpenAI’s API offers a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface. This allows users to try it on virtually any English language task.

Microsoft believes that to truly scale AI possibilities, “responsibly, affordably and equitably,” it would require more than one large technology company can bring to bear. And that’s why, while Microsoft will be utilising the extraordinary capabilities of GPT-3 in their portfolio to benefit their customers, it will also continue to work with OpenAI to keep leveraging and democratising the power of AI research, building safe artificial general intelligence. “That future will be what we make of it – and I believe that we’re on the right track,” concluded Scott.