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Microsoft Rations Access to AI Hardware for Internal Teams

Photo: Art by Clark Miller.

Microsoft is poised to announce a suite of Office 365 tools powered by GPT-4, the powerful new artificial intelligence software made by OpenAI. But now Microsoft is facing an internal shortage of the server hardware needed to run the AI, according to three current Microsoft employees.

That has forced the company to ration access to the hardware for some internal teams building other AI tools to ensure it has enough capacity to handle both Bing’s new GPT-4 powered chatbot and the upcoming new Office tools, set to be announced on Thursday. And the shortage of hardware may be affecting Microsoft customers: At least one told The Information there’s a long wait time to use the OpenAI software Microsoft already makes available through its Azure cloud service.

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