Microsoft announced that it has “exclusively licensed” OpenAI’s sophisticated GPT-3 language model that can generate disturbingly human-like text in applications ranging from commercial bots to creative writing. After investing $1 billion in the San Francisco startup last year to become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud partner, Microsoft will get access to the language tech for itself and its Azure cloud customers.
OpenAI released GPT-3 just a couple of months ago to a limited group of developers, but its capabilities have already generated massive amounts of buzz. It’s the largest language model ever trained, and is capable of not just mundane tasks like auto-generating business correspondence, but also creative or technical chores like poetry, memes and computer code.