Microsoft Mulls ChatGPT Investment as AI Eats the World

Twitter icon  •  Published il y a 1 an  •  Nikolas Sargeant

For a technology that is ostensibly invisible, AI is appearing everywhere right now. You can’t flick through Insta, visit a stock photo website, or talk to your neighbours without being bombarded with AI. Kids are using ChatGPT to do their homework. Designers are deploying Stable Diffusion to do their client work. And now, Microsoft is plotting a major investment into the company that ushered in AI’s singularity event, OpenAI.

Microsoft Eyes OpenAI

Computing giant Microsoft is reportedly considering a $10 billion investment into OpenAI, the company responsible for the phenomenally successful ChatGPT. If the deal proceeds, it would see OpenAI valued at a staggering $29 billion. Microsoft already has close ties with the artificial intelligence company, having invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019.

Some may question the wisdom of a $10 billion investment that wouldn’t even grant Microsoft a controlling stake in OpenAI; its ownership would likely top out at 49% and entitle Microsoft to 75% of all profits until its investment has been repaid. But given OpenAI’s brand recognition and dominance of the consumer-facing AI market, Microsoft’s desire to claim a generous piece of the pie is understandable.

Facebook’s decision to spend billions acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram was questioned at the time but has subsequently been vindicated. You wouldn’t want to bet against the same happening with OpenAI, should the Microsoft deal go through – assuming ChatGPT’s parent company can maintain its staggering rate of innovation. The bigger question is what the mooted move means for the broader AI industry, and whether it could trigger a flurry of further investments from tech companies feeling the FOMO.

AI Assimilates All the Things

With every major technological breakthrough, the greatest opportunities are typically derived from the second order effects. That is, by the services and industries disrupted by its presence. The internet transformed the gig economy and made remote work possible, among other things. We can still only guess at what AI is going to transform, but on ChatGPT’s showing, the answer looks like being “everything.”

Naturally, this AI gold rush will provide good business for providers of picks and shovels: those companies whose tools will enable AI to permeate industries of all kinds. Tech and traditional businesses alike are bound to benefit from artificial intelligence and the labor-saving efficiencies it can drive, but there need to be pipelines to connect businesses to the tech that everyone’s talking about but few are currently using at scale.

In practical terms, these pipelines will come in the form of APIs designed to join isolated systems to the raw data served up by artificial intelligence providers. API creation in web2 is a relatively straightforward process, but it gets more complex when working in web3. Decentralized networks are now deeply interlinked with web2, often using oracles that ensure the data being piped through to onchain environments is accurate and free from tampering.

AI Meets API

Obtaining an accurate data feed for, say, the price of Apple stock can be easily done using oracles such as Chainlink. It gets vastly more complex when working with non-binary data points such as AI, however. This is where specialist providers that can seamlessly connect the on- and off-chain worlds, bringing AI to web3 at scale, come in. Chief among these is Oraichain, whose AI APIs bring artificial intelligence to smart contracts.

The outputs that AI can generate are vast and varying, while smart contracts are programmed to work with a specific set of inputs. Thus, the challenge is in providing secure access to external APIs in a manner that will enhance smart contracts and the services they facilitate.

AI isn’t just the preserve of OpenAI, either, it should be noted, with dozens of companies providing artificial intelligence and machine learning. To surmount this challenge within web3, Oraichain is developing a dedicated marketplace featuring an array of AI algorithms and models from different providers. In the near future, picking an AI to power your blockchain application may be as simple as ordering ice cream at the gelateria.

The Future Is Here

While web2 and web3 companies figure out the best way to connect their worlds, and the global workforce comes to terms with the greatest tech breakthrough in 30 years, the Microsoft rumors rumble on. The investment in OpenAI isn’t quite a done deal, despite what the press are suggesting. The greatest challenge for the eventual owners of ChatGPT may be working out the best way to monetize.

With ChatGPT having acquired one million users in its first five days, there’s no doubting the demand for AI and the wondrous things it can create. Settling on a business model that will satisfy all parties, including the B2B and B2C markets, is a task that will keep OpenAI’s brightest minds busy – including ChatGPT itself.

Author

Nikolas Sargeant

Nik is a content and public relations specialist with an ever-growing interest in Crypto. He has been published on several leading Crypto and blockchain based news sites. He is currently based in Spain, but hails from the Pacific Northwest in the US.