When it comes to AI, OpenAI is killing it as an undisputed leader in the space. Its multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft has worked rather well for the company. However, the tech couple seems to be drifting apart – slowly but surely. And now, as things stand, OpenAI badly needs Apple.
Take OpenAI’s Spring Update conference, for instance, where the company announced the launch of GPT-4o. Though Microsoft is one of the biggest backers of OpenAI, and the company has trained all its models with Microsoft’s Azure and GPU clusters, there was no single mention of Microsoft throughout the conference.
On the other hand, after rumours circulating around a possible partnership between Apple and OpenAI for integrating GPT on iPhone devices, OpenAI seems to be inching closer to the Cupertino giant. This was pretty evident at the conference as well where most of the announcements were made on the iPhone with the ChatGPT app.
But what happens to the Microsoft and OpenAI love story?
Interestingly, it is not just OpenAI which is moving away from Microsoft. The tech giant is striving for independence when it comes to AI. It is done relying on others for its models. According to reports, though the company had been training smaller models like Orca and Phi all this while (using GPT and incorporating Meta’s Llama on its platform), this time it is training a model large enough to compete with others.
Referred to as MAI-1 (possibly Microsoft AI-1), the model is being developed internally by the company, and is around 500 billion parameters in size.
Its development is being headed by Mustafa Suleyman, formerly the co-founder of DeepMind and most recently CEO of the AI startup Inflection, who now oversees Microsoft’s AI division. In March, Microsoft acquired a majority of Inflection’s staff and paid $650 million for its intellectual property rights.
Though the exact purpose of MAI-1 has not been disclosed yet, it is possible that Microsoft might incorporate its products into all its Copilot products. This would mean that the company will move away from OpenAI’s GPT and Codex models.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is making every effort to project a harmonious relationship between the two companies. While the companies are releasing models which seem to rival each other, Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott went on LinkedIn to explain that it was not in any way a competition to OpenAI.
“I’m not sure why this is news, but just to summarise the obvious: we build big supercomputers to train AI models. Our partner OpenAI uses these supercomputers to train frontier-defining models; and then we both make these models available in products and services so that lots of people can benefit from them. We rather like this arrangement,” he said.
But inversely, it would be ideal for Microsoft to have a backup plan just in case the deal with OpenAI falls through, as has been the case with several others in the field. Chief Satya Nadella seems to be playing a different AI game. Under him, Microsoft has invested in all kinds of AI companies, from OpenAI and Mistral to Databricks and Figure AI.
Suleyman recently posted on X saying, “AI is everything at Microsoft”. He also highlighted that the company is building massive products using AI and has a definite vision for Copilot.
Everything about this seems forced. There seems to be no other reason for Microsoft to build such large models and spend so much on compute if they’re not making it for commercial purposes. Moreover, on his hiring, Suleyman was touted as the “new” Sam Altman.
Meanwhile, ahead of OpenAI’s most-anticipated partnership with Apple, Altman recently lauded the Cupertino-based tech giant for its technology prowess, saying, “iPhone is the greatest piece of technology humanity has ever made”, and it’s tough to get beyond it as “the bar is quite high”.
Everyone is leaving OpenAI
To add another layer to all this is the fact that many OpenAI employees are starting to leave the company. Most recently, former co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever quit the company to work on something he loves. A few others, like Jan Leiki from the super alignment team of OpenAI, also left with him. Andrej Karpathy, another founding member, left OpenAI.
Perhaps, Altman is a genius strategist leading OpenAI to perfection by changing the board, turning it into a for-profit company, launching a search engine to compete with Google, while also eliminating threats like Elon Musk. Even though their products are probably the best out there, the company is also heavily in favour of weeding out competition.
For now, OpenAI is positioned very well between the two biggest giants of the globe, Apple and Microsoft. It is becoming the de facto name for AI, which everyone wants to partner with. But as Microsoft is getting heavily self-reliant with Nadella playing 5D chess, OpenAI needs the Apple partnership badly.
