Microsoft defies media report of issues in tie with OpenAI

REDMOND, WASHINGTON – A Microsoft Corp.’s key executive defied a media report that its partnership with OpenAI, the developer of the global-hit generative artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, has issues, saying they will continue to work closely.

The Wall Street Journal last week reported that the relationship between the two companies has produced conflict and confusion, citing people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Eric Boyd, who leads the AI platform team within the tech giant, on June 16 played down the report in an interview with The Korea Economic Daily.

“It's been a very positive relationship for both companies. And we continue to work very closely with them as we look towards where we'll head together in the future,” said Boyd at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

“In any relationship, there are places where we don't always agree on everything. And we have discussions and we resolve those conflicts,” Boyd said. “We've worked really positively together. There certainly have been places where we've had disagreements, but nothing that's been substantial in any way.”

In January, Microsoft announced a new multiyear and multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI to accelerate AI breakthroughs. The deal marked the third phase of the partnership between the two companies after Microsoft’s previous investments in 2019 and 2021.

FOR AMBITION OF AI-FIRST COMPANY

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been leading the firm with a goal to become an AI-first company for the last six to seven years, Boyd said.

Nadella started the AI 365 forum, a weekly meeting where he gathered the AI leaders and product leaders from across the company to talk about how they're using AI and each of their products, according to Boyd.

“I want us to be chasing after the projects that are really going to leverage the most interesting work, the most interesting technology capable in AI, and bring that into our products,” Boyd said. “That push has been instrumental in really moving the company to where it is today.”

Microsoft’s efforts for the ambition found crucial momentum from the partnership with OpenAI, he said.

“They want to develop AI that benefits humanity. And we want to bring the benefits of that to every person or organization on the planet to help them achieve more so really aligned goals with OpenAI,” Boyd said.

“What we notice with open AI is that on those language models, we were still at the steep part of the curve where we had a long way to go before we would see the degradation of performance.”

Microsoft partnered with OpenAI and built the world’s fifth-largest supercomputer at that time to support the company,” Boyd said.

The Big Tech company accelerated its growth as it was the world’s first company to utilize GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest multimodal large language model. Microsoft has been focusing on generative AI services since the second half of last year and the strategy started bearing fruit. Among its accomplishments, its cloud computing platform Azure was outstanding.

“We talked about ten times customer increase for Azure open AI service. I think there's now 4500 customers using that,” Boyd said.

Microsoft aims to improve customers’ productivity through its generative AI services, he added.

“We're helping our customers achieve the work that they do and we know that that's going to lead to good returns for our company.”

Write to Ki-Yeol Seo at philos@hankyung.com
 
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.