OpenAI Needs Billions to Keep ChatGPT Running. Enter Microsoft
The enormous processing capacity needed to run modern AI systems is shaping their technical development and business model.
To a user firing up OpenAI’s chatbot hoping to generate automated haikus about the American Revolution or recipes for Spam casserole, the product’s basic interface and instantaneous answers can seem simple, even magical.
On the other side of those queries, though, an immense amount of work is going on. OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot requires far more computing power to answer a question than Google takes to respond to a web search. The startup’s current offering is good enough to inspire speculation about a world in which it and programs like it take over some disruptive proportion of the work that only humans can do today. But even if that’s where the economy is headed, getting there is beyond the average startup’s capacity.