Microsoft's plans with OpenAI

For over 30 years, Microsoft has been investing heavily in AI research, which is a large and important area of the company. However, this is far less well known than Microsoft's investment in Open AI, which began in 2019 with an initial investment of one billion dollars. At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft invested another billion dollars in the San Francisco-based company and, according to insider information, now holds around half of the AI specialist's shares. As a result of the cooperation with Open AI, last year was also the most eventful for Microsoft in the field of artificial intelligence to date. However, this primarily relates to more than just the introduction of the intelligent assistant Copilot.

What the partnership looks like

As part of Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, the companies are working very closely together on the development of AI technologies. The cooperation is a key point for Microsoft in the field of AI and is also essentially the public face of the company's work in the field of AI, which has so far been rather inconspicuous in the background. The investment in OpenAI enables Microsoft to use OpenAI technology not only for Windows or the Bing search engine, but also for Microsoft Advertising or in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, for example. Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service, for example, provides access to the OpenAI language models, including GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, GPT-3.5-Turbo and the Embeddings model series, as well as to DALL-E and Whisper models. These services are widely available today and can be customized for various tasks such as content development, summarization, image understanding, semantic search and natural language to code translation. Users access the service via REST APIs, a Python SDK or the web-based interface in Azure OpenAI Studio.

How things will continue in 2024

Microsoft plans to expand and deepen its collaboration with OpenAI in 2024. A key element of these plans is the further expansion of Copilot Pro, a premium subscription that offers enhanced AI capabilities for individuals. The subscription includes access to OpenAI's latest models, including GPT-4 Turbo, as well as enhanced AI imaging capabilities via DALL-E 3. Copilot Pro will be available across multiple devices, including Windows PCs, Macs, iPads and soon cell phones. Copilot Pro is also available in Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote on PC, Mac and iPad for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.

In addition, Microsoft has made its Copilot services for Microsoft 365 available to organizations of all sizes, including small and medium-sized businesses. Copilot integrates Microsoft 365 AI capabilities into the everyday work environment by using data from emails, meetings, chats, documents and more to respond to natural language commands.

Another important step in the development of Microsoft Copilot is its integration into the new "Microsoft Planner", which replaces the previous apps "Tasks by Planner", "Microsoft Project for the Web" and "To Do". The new Planner will be scalable from simple task management to enterprise project management and is intended to speed up and simplify work and project management with AI-based functions.

Antitrust law problems

Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) is monitoring Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. The EU is conducting a preliminary investigation to determine whether Microsoft's investment in OpenAI could be considered a hidden merger. This investigation is part of the EU's efforts to ensure proper regulatory oversight of the rapid development of AI technology and to ensure that large players do not dominate the market in a way that hinders competition. Meanwhile, the German Federal Cartel Office has already ruled that the cooperation between Microsoft and OpenAI is not a case for merger control. The reason given by the cartel office was that the additional involvement of Microsoft did not create a deeper connection than after the original entry in 2019.

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