EU examines Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI

2024-01-09 13:06:36

The agreement between OpenAIcompany behind the conversational robot ChatGPT, and Microsoft faces a possible investigation from European regulators. The European Commission has started to examine the investment that the technology company behind Windows has made in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup directed by Sam Altman, as announced by the community institution itself in a statement.

“The European Commission is checking whether Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI could be reviewable under the EU Merger Regulation,” the announcement reads. “We are inviting companies and experts to inform us of any competition issues they may perceive in these industries, while closely monitoring AI partnerships to ensure they do not unduly distort market dynamics,” he said. for her part, the European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager.

It should be remembered that, to date, Microsoft has announced an investment in OpenAI of $13 billion. Thanks to this agreement, the technology company can use the technology that powers ChatGPT in its own products. Something that it has been doing for months in services such as its Bing search engine or in the Copilot generative AI application.

Microsoft also has its own member on the startup’s board of directors for a few days: Dee Templeton. As announced at the end of November, he will not have the ability to vote on decisions, although he will be informed of all movements made in the ChatGPT company. Therefore, the presence of the big technology company in the startup increases.

With the start of this study, the EU follows in the footsteps of the United Kingdom and the United States, which have also been reviewing the partnership between the two technology firms since December.

At the beginning of that month, the EU Competition Department already stated, in statements collected by ‘Reuters‘, which had closely followed the scandal involving OpenAI in the last days of November, when the previous board of directors fired Sam Altman from his position as executive director and reinstated him in the position five days later. All thanks to the support of practically all of the startup’s and Microsoft’s workers, who even announced that he would give a position in a new AI laboratory to all OpenAI employees who decided to leave the company.