Microsoft is betting big on the creator of ChatGPT in the race to dominate artificial intelligence

OpenAI is led by Sam Altman, who rose to fame in Silicon Valley as the head of startup-building firm Y Combinator. the master. Altman, 37, and his partners set up the OpenAI Foundation in 2015 as a non-profit organization. But he quickly reframed the venture as a for-profit company that could pursue financing more aggressively.

A year later, Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company and committed to building the supercomputer technologies that OpenAI’s formidable models would demand while becoming “Preferred Marketing PartnerIts technologies. OpenAI later Officially licensed transfers its technologies to Microsoft, allowing the company to add them directly to Microsoft products and services.

And with support from Microsoft, OpenAI has continued to build A prominent technology called GPT-3. Known as the “big language model,” it can generate text on its own, including tweets, blog posts, news articles, and even computer code.

Difficult to use, it was mostly a tool for companies and engineers. But a year later, OpenAI started working on it DALL-E, which allowed anyone to create realistic images by simply describing what they wanted to see. Microsoft has integrated GPT-3, DALL-E, and similar technologies into its own products.

GitHub, a popular online service for Microsoft-owned programmers, has started offering a programming tool called Copilot. As programmers build smartphone apps and other software, Copilot Suggest the following line of code As they type, auto-complete tools suggest the next word as you type texts or emails.

For many, it was a “watershed moment” that showed what was possible, mr. Boyd said, from Microsoft.

Then, at the end of last year, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT. More than a million people tested the chatbot during its first few days online. He answered trivia questions, explained ideas, and generated everything from school papers to lyrics for popular songs.