Microsoft announced a multi-year, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) natural language processor, marking the third investment by the cloud giant into the rapidly ascending AI vendor. The news also comes on the heels of Microsoft citing greater use of AI in taking a billion-dollar charge tied to extensive job cuts.

The cloud hyperscaler initially invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, with another investment in 2021. Microsoft says this relationship "enables each of us to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies."

Microsoft plans to deploy OpenAI models across its consumer and enterprise products and has also secured itself as OpenAI's sole cloud provider for research, product, and API services workloads.

This partnership is likely to be fruitful, as GlobalData Analyst Charlotte Dunlap noted cloud-native application modernization efforts will be driven by AI tools like ChatGPT. Dunlap anticipates "ground-breaking" AI chatbots based on large language models "will ease developers' cumbersome coding requirements" by automating the process of writing scripts – including in unfamiliar programming languages.

Along with allowing people to create new code without actually learning a programming language, "a major use case [for ChatGPT] will be in improving the natural language understanding of apps targeting customer service to provide more human-like responses to user-inputs," she wrote. "Such technology advancements will result in a newfound prioritization of DevOps among enterprises, based on a new wave of developer technologies, which significantly remove obstructions hindering deployment of modern apps."

Microsoft last week announced it's shelling out $1.2 billion to lay off slightly less than 5% of its total workforce.

According to an email sent to employees by CEO Satya Nadella, those 10,000 jobs are no longer needed to meet the cloud hyperscaler’s long-term goals or customer demand in light of the continued advancement of AI and shuttered enterprise spending caused by economic uncertainty.

Nadella expects the next wave of computing will be “born with advances in AI,” he wrote to employees, suggesting automation and AI are primed to limit the company's need for human headcount.