With ChatGPT's explosion in recent months, and the impact of Dall-E 2 earlier in 2022, Microsoft is finally getting a return on its investment in OpenAI.

The vendor initially invested $1 billion in the AI startup in 2019. It also became the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and its preferred partner.

Since then, ChatGPT, the easy-to-use query-based language model that is trained on an immense storehouse of knowledge, has quickly become an international sensation heralded as ushering in a new era of mass AI. OpenAI's Dell-E technology does the same for text-to-image applications, enabling users to easily ask the model to create complex and varied images.