Microsoft Will No Longer Be Exclusive to OpenAI

Microsoft is set to decrease its dependency on OpenAI and plans to add more internal and third-party AI models to Microsoft 365 Copilot. 

As per reports, this move stems from an attempt to reduce costs and diversify the underlying AI models. The company is also working on integrating its own models into 365 Copilot. 

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-featured assistant integrated into Office Suite tools like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, as well as a conversational assistant. 

A few months ago, GitHub, now owned by Microsoft, integrated models from Anthropic and Google in GitHub Copilot. More recently, reports surfaced that Microsoft may take part in Anthropic’s fundraising efforts in the future. 

Moreover, OpenAI and Microsoft also have a clause in their agreement. This states that if OpenAI announces AGI or artificial general intelligence, Microsoft will no longer have access to OpenAI’s frontier models. 

Earlier this month, OpenAI released its o3 family of models that achieved a new high on almost every benchmark out there. This led to several discussions about the company being on the path to achieving AGI soon. 

While there are also reports that OpenAI is working on removing the clause – is Microsoft hedging on other models to stay in the game? 

Delivering a speech at the 2024 FinRegLab AI Symposium, Altman said, “By the end of 2025, I expect we will have systems that can do truly astonishing cognitive tasks, like where you’ll use it and be like, that thing is smarter than me at a lot of hard problems.”

Moreover, the competitors aren’t big fans of Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. Recently, Alphabet asked the Federal Trade Commission to end their partnership. Reports suggest that companies that buy OpenAI’s technology may have to pay an additional cost if they do not use Microsoft’s servers to run it. 

Moreover, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and xAI has had a long tussle with the OpenAI since his departure. In his lawsuits that claim OpenAI has abandoned its once set ‘not for profit’ mission, he has now dragged Micorosft, accusing them of anti-competitive and monopolistic practices.