Microsoft considering £8bn investment in Chat GPT owner, says Semafor
Microsoft is in talks to invest $10bn (£8.2bn) into ChatGPT-owner Open AI, according to reports by Semafor earlier today, citing people familiar with the matter.
According to the report, Microsoft’s investment would take OpenAI’s valuation up to $29bn.
The deal would initially be based on a revenue share, which will see Microsoft take 75 per cent of OpenAI’s earnings till it recoups its investment. Following this, Microsoft will reportedly retain a 49 per cent stake in the artificial intelligence business.
ChatGPT, a sophisticated chatbot which can answer requests from writing essays to debugging code, has proved extremely popular since it was made free to use in November, crossing one million active users within the first five days of launching.
Earlier in the week it was reported that Microsoft would be adding ChatGPT to the Bing Search engine.
However, industry experts remain sceptical of how “ground-breaking” the chatbot actually is.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told City A.M. he did not believe ChatGPT was doing anything new other than making existing chatbot capabilities more accessible.
“‘What ChatGPT did is democratise AI on a website where everyone can try it for themselves, and gave people a peek into the ‘future’. But this is a future that many of us have been living in for quite some time. The future is already here, it just hasn’t been evenly distributed yet,” he said.
Ghodsi added that while he thought ChatGPT was overhyped, it was allowing people to see how AI can make life easier.
Microsoft declined to comment while OpenAI was approached for comment.