Microsoft has invested millions in OpenAI, but it is not marrying anyone: it will open its own AI center in the United Kingdom

Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI to drive its strategy focused on artificial intelligence with products like Copilot based on GPT-4. The Redmond giant, however, has not delegated all responsibility for this important field to its new external partner.

The company behind Windows, Azure and Office continues to work on its own AI laboratories, strategic pieces over which it has direct control. We recently learned that one of the founders of DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman, took over as CEO of Microsoft AI. Now we know his next step.

New AI hub in London

Microsoft has announced that it will open a new AI hub in London. Microsoft AI London will be led by Jordan Hoffmann, a scientist who until a few months ago was part of the Microsoft AI working group. Inflection AIan AI startup previously integrated by Suleyman in which the Redmond giant also invested.

According to the official statement, the mission of Microsoft AI London will be to create new language models, as well as advance the development of the computing infrastructure necessary for these tasks. But we don't know exactly what products will emerge in these facilities, although it will have several employees and hardware.

Microsoft assures that in the coming weeks and months it will take on the task of “hire exceptional people who want to work on the most interesting and challenging AI questions of our time.” Likewise, the initiative is part of a commitment to bring more than 20,000 GPUs to the United Kingdom before 2026.

Microsoft's AI data centers in the United States are currently equipped with NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs, but the company has said it will adopt the new NVIDIA B200. We don't know if we will see these specialized graphics in Europe as well, but we have reason to believe that it is a possibility.

Those led by Satya Nadella have also invested in Mistral AI. We are talking about “Europe's OpenAI” which among its products has the conversational chatbot called Mistral Le Chat. The agreement means, among other things, that Mistral will be able to use Microsoft's cloud infrastructure to train its AI models.

But, as we say, despite investments in external companies, Microsoft continues to consolidate its internal resources. The company, let us remember, has under its umbrella the prestigious subsidiary Microsoft Research that between 2010 and 2018 it filed more than 154,000 patents of AI, becoming a prominent player.

Images | Maxim Hopman | Lumière Rezaie

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