OpenAI has a long history, but pretty much of it is straightforward.
Founded in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. It was originally a research organization dedicated to advancing AI in a way that benefits humanity.
With a $1 billion commitment from its founders and other donors, OpenAI began its research activities and published several papers on reinforcement learning, neural networks, and unsupervised learning, before making step-by-step advancements toward creating its notable products, like the GPT-1 in 2018, GPT-2 in 2019, and GPT-3 in 2020.
Now, with GPT-4 and its variations, like GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini, as well as DALL·E 3 and Sora, products of OpenAI are considered the benchmarks of Large Language Models.
As a result of this, OpenAI has lots of 'enemies'.
Having created an arms race between tech companies, any other LLM-powered AI product that hits the market, will be compared to OpenAI's in one way or another.
This time, even its closest friend can become an adversary.
Microsoft has been the most prominent investor in OpenAI, helping the ChatGPT developer further its efforts in the burgeoning and potentially lucrative land of AI.
Having spent $1 billion in funding into OpenAI, with an additional $2 billion in the following years, Microsoft biggest investment kicked off in January 2023, when it promised to pour in $10 billion over multiple years.
With the deal, OpenAI can tap into Microsoft's near-limitless computing resources, in return, ChatGPT and OpenAI's GPT models have been integrated into several Microsoft products and services to give them with AI-powered abilities.
The two tech companies have forged a symbiotic connection that benefits both, capable of disrupting the industry as a whole.
But in Microsoft's annual report, besides pointing out that Microsoft has a long-term partnership with OpenAI and uses OpenAI's models in various consumer and enterprise products, Microsoft is also competing with OpenAI in several key sectors.
Microsoft said toward the beginning of its annual report:
"We have a long-term partnership with OpenAI, a leading AI research and deployment company."
"We deploy OpenAI's models across our consumer and enterprise products. As OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider, Azure powers all of OpenAI's workloads. We have also increased our investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI's research."
But down the report, Microsoft acknowledged the rivalry between it and OpenAI and other partners.
Microsoft directly cited OpenAI as one of its competitors, particularly in search and news advertising.
In other words, Microsoft and OpenAI is not just friends.
Their relationship is much more than that, because interest has sparked competition between them.
When OpenAI was younger and far less influential, the differences between OpenAI and Microsoft was so huge and so far apart, that the two realized the potential of having a partnership.
Now that OpenAI and Microsoft have become closer and closely related, especially due to how the two are dependent to each other, their similarities in their products have created rivalries.
"Our AI offerings compete with AI products from hyper scalers such as Amazon and Google, as well as products from other emerging competitors, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and other open source offerings, many of which are also current or potential partners," Microsoft said.
Regardless of the rivalry between the two, nothing changed between them.
Their partnership continues, and that they too know that it was established with the understanding that they would often compete.
Read: Microsoft Was 'Below Them, Above Them, Around Them,' In Reference To OpenAI