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Microsoft (MSFT -2.50%) defied gravity on the stock exchange Wednesday, with its share price crawling up by nearly 2% against the S&P 500 index’s 0.7% drop. Investors were encouraged by the announcement of a new advancement in the artificial intelligence (AI) business it’s involved in, plus the tech giant’s latest dividend declaration.
Microsoft is a leading shareholder of privately held OpenAI, developer of the white-hot AI program ChatGPT. So it wasn’t surprising when investors bid up Microsoft’s stock just after the latter announced the latest version of the app had gone live.
This is ChatGPT-4, a cutting-edge AI system that expands the capabilities of the existing program. Among other features, it allows users to input both text and image prompts to produce an intelligent and cleanly written response from the platform.
While Microsoft does not steer OpenAI’s business, it is heavily involved in the AI company. The tech giant has participated in three rounds of investment into OpenAI, and is harnessing its technology for some of its offerings (such as the Bing search engine).
Another plus for Microsoft’s investors is that it’s getting ready to pay its millions of shareholders.
It declared its latest quarterly dividend, $0.68 per share. At the most recent closing stock price, this would yield just over 1%. This matches the two previous distributions; prior to that, Microsoft paid out $0.62 per share. The upcoming disbursement is to be paid on June 8 to stockholders of record as of May 18.
Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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