Microsoft Corp (MSFT. O) announced that it is expanding access to wildly popular software from OpenAI, a startup it is funding and whose ChatGPT chatbot has captured Silicon Valley’s attention with its futuristic design.
Microsoft announced that the startup’s technology, which it had previously shown off to its cloud computing users in a program it called the Azure OpenAI Service, was now generally available. This development is anticipated to result in an explosion of new applications.
The information comes at a time when Microsoft has considered increasing the $1 billion stake in OpenAI that it announced in 2019 according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
Following the release of ChatGPT in November—a text-based chatbot that can compose poetry, prose, or even computer code—public interest in OpenAI skyrocketed. ChatGPT itself, not just its underlying tech, will soon be available via Microsoft’s cloud, it said in a blog post.