Microsoft Broadens AI Bets Beyond OpenAI With Meta Alliance

By Jason Nelson

On Tuesday, during its annual Inspire event, tech giant Microsoft announced that it had inked a deal with Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to integrate the social media giant’s AI model, LLama 2, into the Microsoft Azure cloud-computing platform.

"Meta has been doing phenomenal work innovating in the open models, and Llama has captured the imagination of what open-source and AI foundation models can do," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the Azure AI presentation. "We are very excited today is the announcement of Meta's Llama 2 coming to Azure and Windows."

LLama 2 will be made available to developers using Microsoft's Azure platform at no additional cost. Also, Microsoft announced a $30 per person subscription model for businesses using its Copilot for Microsoft 365 suite. Copilot is an AI engine that aims to increase productivity and creativity using artificial intelligence.

Microsoft’s stock price rose 5% on Tuesday after the new projects and partnerships were announced and is currently trading at $362, according to data from MarketWatch.

Meanwhile, Meta’s stock price rose 0.38% today and currently trades at $311, according to MarketWatch.

Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads—pushed hard into artificial intelligence this year after pivoting from its metaverse and NFT projects. Last week, Meta launched a new text-to-image model dubbed CM3leon that can generate images from text prompts.

In May, Meta said it had trained its AI model, which could identify over 4000 languages, on the Bible and other religious texts.

"We want to make it easier for people to access information and use devices in their preferred language, and today we’re announcing a series of artificial intelligence models that could help them do just that," Meta said at the time.

In June, Meta announced the Voicebox AI speech tool, which the company said it would not release due to concerns that it could be used maliciously.

While the news of the deal with Meta may sound like Microsoft is moving away from its long and lucrative partnership with OpenAI, Nadella assured the audience that Microsoft aims to continue its relationship with the creator of ChatGPT.

"Simply put, Microsoft loves OpenAI," Nadella said. "Every one of these platform shifts that we've been engaged in has also come with an iconic, industry-shaping partnership that we have been involved in, and in this age, and this era, it's the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI."

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