Microsoft has been looking to invest $10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, Semafor has reported. Microsoft wanted to stump up the money in collaboration with other venture firms and issued documents to possible investors. Those documents say that Microsoft was looking to finalize things by the end of 2022 so it could have already decided what to do.
The terms Microsoft has come up with for the funding are very favourable to it indeed. Apparently, Microsoft would receive a massive 75% of OpenAI’s profits until it gets its original investment back. Once Microsoft recoups its initial investment, Semafor says “it would revert to a structure that reflects ownership of OpenAI”, that is, Microsoft would have a 49% stake and the investors would have another 49%, leaving the non-profit parent, OpenAI Inc. with just 2%.
Nothing is set in stone with this plan and it could completely fall through. It’s interesting that these details are coming to light, though, given that Microsoft was reportedly looking to integrate ChatGPT into Bing to give it an edge over competitors such as DuckDuckGo and Google. Neither Microsoft nor OpenAI commented on those rumours.
If Microsoft does go ahead with this $10 billion investment in OpenAI, it won’t be the first time it has helped the company financially. Back in 2019, Microsoft injected $1 billion into the company to help it build projects like ChatGPT.
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