It’s no secret that Microsoft is a close partner to OpenAI, seeing as how it has signed multiple deals with the company. Now, the AI company has solidified this relationship further by offering exclusive licensing access to its popular GPT-3 text generation model to Microsoft.
The Seattle-based tech giant said that this deal will allow them to “leverage its technical innovations to develop and deliver advanced AI solutions for our customers, as well as create new solutions that harness the amazing power of advanced natural language generation.”
This means the company will be able to use GPT-3 in consumer-facing products such as Office, Windows, and Teams.
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What this also means is that Microsoft is getting some extra access to the GPT-3 model itself, while others will have to resort to using OpenAI‘s API for all their use cases.
It’s not clear if Microsoft will start offering its own APIs based on this model. We’ve asked the company to provide more details, and we’ll update the story if we hear back.
Meanwhile, OpenAI clarified on its blog that this move won’t impact OpenAI’s GPT-3 API offering. The API remains under a limited beta program after opening access to select developers in July. Recently, the company announced a pricing structure for people who wanted to use more than 100K tokens, and it’s not exactly cheap at $100 per month for 2M tokens.
Last year, Microsoft inked a $1 billion deal with OpenAI to build ‘Supercomputer AI’ hosted on Azure. Later, OpenAI used Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure to develop GPT-3. This new deal probably means that you probably won’t see Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud offering GPT-3 based tools.
It might be a while till we see Microsoft offer any solutions using GPT-3. But at some point, we’ll finally get to see some real-world examples of the model rather than reading ‘generative’ articles and poems.
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Published September 23, 2020 — 07:03 UTC