OpenAI, the research company behind the GPT-3 natural language generator, has announced a $ 100 million fund for AI startups working on viable and promising AI technologies.
The fund, which was announced on May 26 at the Microsoft Build virtual developer conference, includes contributions from Microsoft, which already has a close relationship with OpenAI, and other partners, the company said in a statement.
The $ 100 million fund is intended to support a small number of early-stage start-ups in fields where artificial intelligence can have a transformative effect, such as health, climate change, education, and in areas where artificial intelligence can have a transformative effect. that AI tools can empower people by helping them be more productive through personal assistants and semantic searches, the company said.
Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of the company, said OpenAI “will invest in startups with great ideas on how to use AI to transform the world. The plan is for the fund not to mimic the typical corporate venture fund. Instead, it will place large early bets on a relatively small number of companies, probably no more than 10 ”.
The executive added: “We believe that helping people be more productive with new tools is big business. And we can imagine totally new interfaces that weren’t possible a year ago. They are not the only applications that we will consider, but they preside over our list of objectives ”.
The fund will be especially interested in hearing from startups run by founders of underrepresented groups, Altman said. “We look forward to treating dedicated companies as close partners and working alongside the founders here. They will get early access to future OpenAI systems, discounts on Azure, and support from our team. We are really excited about the opportunity for startups, for the industry and for people around the world who can put AI to work to improve their lives. ”
The cooperation between OpenAI and Microsoft has been on the rise since 2019, when the two organizations partnered to develop and expand new joint AI supercomputing capabilities on Azure. In July of that year, Microsoft invested $ 1 billion in OpenAI to support the company’s AI work, which was a huge boost to the project.
In 2020, the companies collaborated on building an Azure-hosted AI supercomputer to train OpenAI models. Finally, in September 2020, Microsoft granted the exclusive license of GPT-3 to OpenAI, covering the use of GPT-3 for all Microsoft products and services. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the first integration of GPT-3 into one of its products, its Microsoft Power Apps software, which aims to make it easier for corporate workers to create low-code and no-code applications.
The OpenAI GPT-3 is a massive natural language model that runs exclusively on Microsoft Azure. GPT-3, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, which, according to OpenAI, is ten times more than any previous non-sparse language model.
Watch video where Sam Altman presents the initiative. The page includes the application form.