The software giant is in talks to invest $10B into OpenAI, the maker of the viral ChatGPT chatbot in a deal that would value OpenAI at $29B.  The deal reportedly has a complicated structure in which Microsoft would first recoup a portion of its investment and then own 49% of the company – you can read more from Semafor here.  Also, take a look at the picture (above) of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI doing the money walk.

Related:  That’s not to say that Microsoft hasn’t been developing its own AI tech in house – just last Thursday, for example, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that, get this, can emulate a person’s voice, including emotional tone, given only a 3-second audio sample.  It can then synthesize audio of that person saying anything the programmer wants them to say.

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