Microsoft and OpenAI Redefine Partnership, Paving Way for Autonomous AGI Pursuits
REDMOND, WA – March 18, 2024 – Microsoft and OpenAI today announced a significant evolution of their strategic partnership, granting OpenAI greater autonomy to develop it’s technology and pursue independent artificial general intelligence (AGI) research, while solidifying Microsoft’s position as a key cloud and technology partner. Teh revised agreement addresses key areas of intellectual property, commercial rights, and future progress, signaling a new phase of collaboration after a period of intense growth and scrutiny.
The changes aim to foster innovation on both sides, allowing OpenAI to explore broader partnerships and product development opportunities, including releasing open-weight models, while ensuring microsoft maintains a strong foothold in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. This restructuring impacts developers, businesses, government agencies, and the broader AI community, as it clarifies the future direction of two of the industry’s most influential players.
Key updates to the partnership include a clarified delineation of intellectual property rights. Research IP remains with OpenAI, while Microsoft retains rights to model architecture, weights, inference and finetuning code, and data center infrastructure. Microsoft’s IP rights now exclude OpenAI’s consumer hardware. OpenAI is now empowered to jointly develop products with third parties, with API products exclusive to Azure, and non-API products potentially available on other cloud platforms.
Notably, Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI development, either alone or in collaboration with other partners. any AGI development utilizing OpenAI’s IP will be subject to significant compute thresholds, exceeding the scale of current leading models.The existing revenue-sharing agreement will continue until an expert panel verifies the achievement of AGI, with payments distributed over a longer timeframe.
Further changes involve OpenAI’s commitment to purchase an additional $250 billion in Azure services, while Microsoft’s right of first refusal as OpenAI’s exclusive compute provider has been removed. OpenAI is also now authorized to provide API access to US government national security customers, regardless of cloud provider.
