Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
A source told The Information that TikTok was paying Microsoft almost $20 million per month to access OpenAI’s models as of March, making up nearly a quarter of the revenue generated by its increasingly lucrative cloud division.
Microsoft’s cloud AI business was on track to earn $1 billion in annual revenue, according to The Information, but the report notes that TikTok may not need these capabilities this heavily if it develops its own large language model (LLM).
Last year, my colleague Alex Heath reported that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was “secretly using” OpenAI’s technology to create an LLM of its own:
This practice is generally considered a faux pas in the AI world. It’s also in direct violation of OpenAI’s terms of…