• Microsoft and the OpenAI artificial intelligence research lab have announced an investment that will span multiple years and billions of dollars.

• The investment marks the beginning of the third phase of the relationship and comes after Microsoft's first two investments, which were made in 2019 and 2021, respectively.

• Microsoft asserts that the alliance will hasten the development of artificial intelligence and provide assistance to businesses in the process of commercialising cutting-edge technologies.

Microsoft declined to provide a specific dollar amount, but Semafor had earlier this month asserted that the company was in talks to invest up to $10 billion.

The arrangement launches the third phase of the two companies' cooperation after Microsoft's earlier investments in 2019 and 2021. Microsoft claims that the partnership will accelerate the development of AI and enable both companies to commercialise cutting-edge technology in the future.

'We built our cooperation with OpenAI around a shared vision to properly promote cutting-edge AI research and democratise AI as a new technology platform,' Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated in a blog post.

Microsoft's cloud platform Azure works closely with OpenAI. In July 2019, Microsoft made a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, making it the 'single' provider of cloud computing services to OpenAI. Microsoft stated on Monday that Azure would remain the only source for OpenAI.

According to the news release, Microsoft's investment will help the two companies build new AI-powered experiences and perform supercomputing at scale.

Academics rank OpenAI as one of the world's top three AI research facilities. OpenAI has developed game-playing AI software that can surpass humans in games like Dota 2. Its eccentric AI text generator GPT-3 and AI picture generator Dall-E have garnered more attention.

ChatGPT automatically creates text from typed instructions in a much more sophisticated and inventive manner than previous Silicon Valley chatbots. 

The show premiered in late November, and it quickly went viral as tech executives and venture capitalists gushed about it on Twitter and even compared it to Apple's 2007 iPhone launch.

Officials from Google expressed interest in the technology during a recent all-hands meeting. They pointed out that while Google has comparable AI capabilities, implementing AI chat technology too rapidly could hurt its reputation.

Among the OpenAI founders were Sam Altman, Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. 

The group initially committed to investing more than $1 billion in the project. Musk resigned from the board in February 2018, although he kept making donations.