Microsoft is making a big bet on artificial intelligence. The company announced "the third phase" of its relationship with OpenAI -- the creators of ChatGPT and Dall-E 2, among other impressive/concerning AI demos -- which includes "a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment" and the commitment that Microsoft will be the exclusive cloud provider for the AI company. Taken on its own, this is a natural extension of pre-existing financial relationship, but in the context of the last two weeks of brutal tech layoffs -- including major cuts to Microsoft's own augmented and virtual reality teams -- it seems as good a signal as any that Microsoft considers offering AI-enabled services to be a much more viable future than the metaverse. Besides cuts to the company's HoloLens mixed-reality hardware team, Microsoft is also sunsetting at least two VR software efforts. First, AltspaceVR, a social VR platform Microsoft acquired when it started dabbling in mixed-reality experiences in 2017, is shutting down in March.

Microsoft today said that it's extending its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind art- and text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and GPT-3, with a "multi-year, multi-billion-dollar" investment. OpenAI says that the infusion of new capital -- the exact amount of which wasn't disclosed -- will be used to continue its independent research and develop AI that's "safe, useful and powerful." The optics aren't the best for Microsoft, which just last week announced plans to lay off 10,000 employees as a part of broader cost-cutting measures. But they'd been telegraphed by the company earlier this month -- in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft planned to make OpenAI's foundational systems available as commercials platforms so that any entity in any industry can build on them. OpenAI will remain a capped-profit company as a part of the new investment deal with Microsoft.

OpenAI's conversational language model ChatGPT has a lot to say, but is likely to lead you astray if you ask it for moral guidance. Introduced in November, ChatGPT is the latest of several recently released AI models eliciting interest and concern about the commercial and social implications of mechanized content recombination and regurgitation. These include DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Codex, and GPT-3. While DALL-E and Stable Diffusion have raised eyebrows, funding, and litigation by ingesting art without permission and reconstituting strangely familiar, sometimes evocative imagery on demand, ChatGPT has been answering query prompts with passable coherence. That being the standard for public discourse, pundits have been sufficiently wowed that they foresee some future iteration of an AI-informed chatbot challenging the supremacy of Google Search and do all sorts of other once primarily human labor, such as writing inaccurate financial news or increasing the supply of insecure code.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. Right now there is no "killer" use case for using ChatGPT in the enterprise -- that is, one that will have an enormous impact on the top and the bottom line -- according to EY's global chief technology officer, Nicola Morini Bianzino. But that could soon change: The next six to 12 months will bring an explosion of experimentation, he predicted, especially once companies are able to build on top of ChatGPT using OpenAI's API. And the killer use case that emerges could be around generative AI's impact on knowledge management -- that Bianzino describes as the "dialectic of AI." "Knowledge companies tend to store knowledge in a very flat, two-dimensional way that makes it difficult to access, interact and have a dialogue with," he told VentureBeat in an interview. "We tried 20, 30, 40 years ago to build expert systems. That didn't go really well because they were too rigid. I think this technology promises to overcome a lot of issues that expert systems have."

Artificial intelligence (AI) is suddenly the darling of the tech world, thanks to ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can do things such as carry on conversations and write essays and articles with what some people believe is human-like skill. In its first five days, more than a million people signed up to try it. The New York Times hails its "brilliance and weirdness" and says it inspires both awe and fear. For all the glitz and hype surrounding ChatGPT, what it's doing now are essentially stunts -- a way to get as much attention as possible. The future of AI isn't in writing articles about Beyoncé in the style of Charles Dickens, or any of the other oddball things people use ChatGPT for. Instead, AI will be primarily a business tool, reaping billions of dollars for companies that use it for tasks like improving internet searches, writing software code, discovering and fixing inefficiencies in a company's business, and extracting useful, actionable information from massive amounts of data.

Microsoft has announced a deepening of its partnership with the company behind the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT by announcing a multibillion dollar investment in the business. It said the deal with OpenAI would involve deploying the company's artificial intelligence models across Microsoft products, which include the Bing search engine and its office software such as Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, has been a sensation since it launched in November, with users marvelling at its ability to perform a variety of tasks from writing recipes and sonnets to job applications. It is at the forefront of generative AI, or technology trained on vast amounts of text and images that can create content from a simple text prompt. It has also been described as "a gamechanger" that will challenge teachers in universities and schools amid concerns that pupils are already using the chatbot to write high-quality essays with minimal human input.

Microsoft said Monday that it is entering a "third phase" of its relationship with ChatGPT developer OpenAI through a multibillion-dollar investment. But the deal may come with a price for users, too: a $42 monthly "professional" tier subscription that sources say OpenAI is testing among early adopters. In 2019, Microsoft said it would invest $1 billion into OpenAI, then a relatively unknown developer of AI technologies. On Monday, Microsoft said it would extend its partnership through a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs." "Microsoft will deploy OpenAI's models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI's technology," the company said.

Microsoft on Monday said it had extended its partnership with OpenAI, the research lab and creator of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that has sparked widespread fears of cheating in schools and universities. In a company blog post tweeted by CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant announced a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs" that would be "broadly shared with the world." OpenAI's ChatGPT became an internet sensation when it was released without warning in November, allowing users to experiment with its ability to write essays, articles and poems as well as computer code in just seconds. With teachers alarmed by its ability, ChatGPT is banned in universities and school districts - including in New York City and Washington DC - and has sparked nervous debates about the future of office work. California-based OpenAI is also the creator of DALL-E, a program that can swiftly draw up digital images and illustrations at a simple request.

Tel-Aviv-based AI21 Labs launched today Wordtune Spices, a writer-augmentation tool based on generative AI. Selecting from 12 different cues, writers can generate a range of textual options to add to and enhance sentences. Spices can also suggest statistics to strengthen an argument or sharpen a detail. AI21 says Spices is not intended to replace writers but to function as a writing assistant, suggesting additional complete sentences that improve and enhance the text that is being written. It could help refine and enrich the main message of the text, bolster and enrich arguments, and add creative expressions such as a joke or inspirational quote. The Israeli startup claims to have solved one of the major issues with popular applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT which do not give source credit.

Microsoft is once again pouring money into OpenAI as part of an expanded partnership. The tech giant is making a "multibillion dollar" investment that will lead to wider uses of OpenAI's technology, as well as stronger behind-the-scenes support. While the two companies are short on specifics, Microsoft says you can expect "new categories of digital experiences" that include both consumer-facing and business products. The developer-focused Azure OpenAI Service will play a role. The continued union will also see Microsoft boost its investments in supercomputers that accelerate OpenAI's research.