Microsoft’s Exclusive GPT-3 License
On September 22nd, Microsoft announced it would be exclusively licensing GPT-3 as part of its ongoing partnership with Elon Musk’s OpenAI.
This came as no surprise. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s OpenAI. The deep learning research lab had this to say; “OpenAI is producing a sequence of increasingly powerful AI technologies, which requires a lot of capital for computational power. The most obvious way to cover costs is to build a product, but that would mean changing our focus. Instead, we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them.”
Here’s what Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer, said on Tuesday: “Microsoft is teaming up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3, allowing us 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.”
Microsoft has a vast and established customer base, with over a million companies using Office 365, including 800,000 in English-speaking countries. Microsoft also owns Bing, the second-most-popular search engine, and the digital assistant Cortana. These are all areas that heavily rely on natural language processing (NLP) technology, and GPT-3 is miles ahead of the competition.
There’s mutual benefit in the licensing as well. Through Microsoft, OpenAI will gain access to hundreds of millions of users, but more importantly, their interactions with the new NLP platform. This will provide key insights and experience that will allow the research lab to improve and build upon the already impressive GPT-3.
But the real winner will be Microsoft, who will have exclusive access to the most advanced AI technology.
Per Scott: “The scope of commercial and creative potential that can be unlocked through the GPT-3 model is profound, with genuinely novel capabilities — most of which we haven’t even imagined yet. Directly aiding human creativity and ingenuity in areas like writing and composition, describing and summarizing large blocks of long-form data (including code), converting natural language to another language — the possibilities are limited only by the ideas and scenarios that we bring to the table.”
GPT-3 has tons of potential applications within the Microsoft ecosystem, specifically in Word, Excel, and Teams, but these are areas where Microsoft already dominates. A more interesting area to observe is the search engine market. Bing currently has a little over 6 percent of the market share, far behind Google’s 87 percent. GPT-3 may enable Microsoft to roll out new features that will redefine how we use a search engine, which could ultimately bring more users to Bing.
The key benefit of Microsoft’s GPT-3 license is that the company will not be bound to the API pricing model, and will be subsidizing it for its customers. What this means is that Microsoft customers will probably get free access to GPT-3 features. In conclusion, this is huge news for Microsoft as they continue to expand their ability to compete with the other tech giants.