Microsoft’s Nadella Takes Fresh Aim at Google With OpenAI Talks

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Microsoft Corp.'s Satya Nadella is weighing the company's biggest-ever startup investment, seeking to give the software giant an advantage against Google in the race to weave advanced artificial intelligence tools into fields like search and apps.

The company is in discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, the creator of viral AI bot ChatGPT, according to people familiar with its plans. The proposal under consideration calls for Microsoft to inject the cash over several years, though final terms may change, the people said.

ChatGPT, which generates astonishingly human-like conversational text in response to prompts or queries, has lit up the internet since its introduction at the end of November, gathering its first million users in less than a week. Its ability to imitate the way real people talk and write has sparked concern about its potential to supplant professional writers and do students' homework for them. The tool has also been called a potential threat to Google's core search business.

Microsoft is already an OpenAI partner — it invested $1 billion in the startup in 2019. The Redmond, Washington-based company is currently using the developer's language AI to add automation to its GitHub unit's Copilot programming tool, and wants to add such technology to its Bing search engine, Office productivity applications, Teams chat program and security software. The software maker is putting OpenAI's image-creation tool, DALL-E, another viral hit, into design software.

Now Chief Executive Officer Nadella is looking to step up that relationship as Google, which has long been essentially untouchable in search, suddenly appears vulnerable. The Alphabet Inc. unit's prevailing model of keyword queries uses