Microsoft now allows OpenAI to have its own AI compute.

Microsoft and Open AI Tuesday announcement Partnerships have been aligned to allow OpenAI access to competitors’ compute.

The new agreement “includes changes to exclusivity for new capacity and moves to a model where Microsoft has right of first refusal (ROFR),” Microsoft says. “To further support OpenAI, Microsoft has granted OpenAI the ability to build additional capacity primarily for model research and training.”

The basis of the relationship between the two companies (which will last until 2030) remains largely the same. That means Microsoft will remain exclusive to OpenAI technology for products like Copilot, and OpenAI’s API will remain exclusive to Azure. They will maintain a two-way revenue sharing setup. reported (Microsoft gets 20% of OpenAI revenue.) Before today’s change, OpenAI was locked into using Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure only for its computing needs.

The models OpenAI wants to build and the user base it wants to serve will require billions of dollars of compute. It’s done previously reported Some OpenAI shareholders felt that Microsoft wasn’t moving fast enough to provide computing power to OpenAI, which is why the startup partnered with Oracle in June (with Microsoft’s blessing) to provide the computing power it needs.

There have been many rumors that Microsoft and OpenAI are facing relationship problems after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was briefly forced out of the company, causing some very public drama. new york times reported The relationship is said to be increasingly strained by OpenAI’s financial pressures, concerns about its stability and increasing friction between employees of the two companies.

Last March, Microsoft signed a $650 million deal to hire Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman to lead its consumer AI business, along with most of Inflection’s employees. According to new york times The move angered some OpenAI leadership, especially Altman, according to the report.

OpenAI’s deal with Microsoft also has an unusual escape clause. If OpenAI creates artificial general intelligence (AGI), it could block Microsoft’s access to some of the most powerful models developed after that point. AGI is known to be defined as a system that can perform the following functions: Generated over $100 billion From profit. Originally, it was intended to prevent such powerful AI from being commercialized, but now OpenAI According to reports Consider removing this provision, which would free up more Microsoft funding.