OpenAI’s AI at all levels

After ChatGPT in Bing and the Microsoft 365 office suite, Microsoft plans to take advantage of its $10 billion investment in OpenAI to integrate AI into all of its products and services. Real revolution or simple marketing?

Microsoft is betting everything on ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence of the company OpenAI which promises to revolutionize the sector – for good or for bad. All eyes are on it, from internet users curious for unique, detailed and naturally worded answers, to teachers, who see it as a great cheating tool for students, to hackers and scammers , which take advantage of the general enthusiasm to distribute malware, and, of course, those of digital players.

Microsoft, which had not shone in the field of artificial intelligence until now, intends to take advantage of the arrival of this revolutionary tool to boost its products and services. Thus, a few days ago, we learned that the publisher was preparing to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine – still lagging behind – in order to offer more relevant results and tackle Google head-on, but also that he was going to integrate it into his Microsoft 365 suite. But he obviously does not intend to stop there. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, told the Wall Street Journall that the firm was working hard to integrate and market OpenAI tools within its services. He is categorical:all Microsoft products will embed the same capabilities in terms of artificial intelligence to completely transform the product“. And he already knows where to start.

Microsoft and ChatGPT: AI is coming to all products

Microsoft has announced to Bloomberg that Azure Open AI Service, a service that was previously only available to select customers through an invite, was going to be available at scale. He allows since 2021 to the customers of my platform Azure cloud computing to access to all OpenAI tools. In addition to the DALL-E image generator, the GPT-3 language model and the Codex code generator, the Redmond firm plans to integrate ChatGPT soon. “These models can be easily tailored to your specific task, including but not limited to content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language-to-code translation,” she explains. The opening of the service will still be limited “to customers who meet and adhere to the standards of responsible and ethical AI principles that Microsoft has established and published”. These will have to “Make an access request by describing the use case or the intended application before obtaining access to the service”.

Satya Nadella wants to use tools based on artificial intelligence to boost human productivity. If some are worried that AI may eventually “steal” human labor – what’s to stop ChatGPT from writing articles for journalists? –, he believes that it should rather be seen as a help in order to be more efficient and to save time in order to devote himself to important tasks by letting artificial intelligence manage the easiest, boring and/or repetitive ones.

Microsoft 365 and ChatGPT: AI to the rescue of Word, Outlook and PowerPoint

Microsoft had already invested a billion dollars in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2019, feeling its full potential. And with the unveiling of ChatGPT to the general public, the company seems to have bet on the right horse. His investment allows him to benefit from an exclusive license on GPT-3, the language model behind the revolutionary AI. Visibly seduced by the first results, it would prepare a new investment of 10 billion dollars, as reported by the newsletter Semafor. This would allow her to receive 75% of the profits generated by OpenAI as long as she has not recovered her initial stake. Once this is done, it will get 49% of the revenue, while 49% will go to various investors, and the remaining 2% to non-profit actors linked to OpenAI. Everyone is a winner, since this allows the start-up to benefit from the funds necessary for its development, especially since the calculation costs are exorbitant. For its part, the Redmond firm will be able to use their technologies for its own tools. Note, however, that Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, said in an interview that the partnership with Microsoft is not exclusive, which means that OpenAI is in theory free to sell its technology to other companies.

Microsoft wants to integrate AI into Microsoft 365, its office suite that replaces Microsoft Office. Thus, it will use it to improve Outlook search results so that users can find what they are looking for without having to use keywords. The firm also looked at how these AI models could suggest responses to emails and recommend document edits to improve user writing in Word. Of course, ChatGPT adapts to the specificities of each software in order to complement them as well as possible. It is not known, however, if Microsoft plans to launch these functions or if it is simply an ongoing experiment.

It is easy to imagine the possibilities that such an integration could open up, such as summarizing information from Teams meeting transcripts or automatic redaction for certain paragraphs, or even entire texts, within different software. “AI will reinvent the way you do everything on Windows”said last week to The Verge Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief for Windows and Surface. Still, the firm will have to face many challenges and difficulties to achieve this, such as the reliability and accuracy of the answers/proposals, while protecting the confidentiality of user data.

ChatGPT and Bing: a combination as promising as it is risky

In addition to Microsoft Office, ChatGPT could also be a game changer in the field of search engines. No need to enter keywords and sort through the countless results to obtain information! ChatGPT offers a simple and complete direct response in natural language – you can even impose a response style on it. Again according to The Information, the Redmond company is preparing to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. The objective: to attack Google head-on.

Thanks to its investment in 2019 in OpenAI, Microsoft is preparing to integrate the DALL-E image generator into the new application of its Office suite, Microsoft Designer. The Redmond firm would thus plan, from March, to directly display AI responses as the first response from its search engine, in the form of complete sentences citing the source of the response. Please note that AI would not replace Bing’s search engine technology, on the contrary it would complement and enrich it.

The objective of such a merger for Microsoft is to finally position itself as the real competitor of Google, which alone holds 90% of the sector’s market share. Facing him, the Redmond firm seems very tiny, even if it is the world number two in research with tens of millions of users. She couldn’t let this unique opportunity pass her by. It will however have to ensure the quality of the answers delivered because, if it is not very serious that a tool in beta version offers erroneous answers – the user is warned and on his guard, he is precisely there to testing and testing the technology – that’s much more problematic for a search engine aimed at the general public.

ChatGPT: Google strikes back cautiously

Many see it as a potential competitor to Google – an idea that is not shared by AI – so much so that the Mountain View firm, yet a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, is really worried. . To the point of launching a “red code” and reorganizing various departments to move forward on its AI projects. But there is still work to make ChatGPT really operational and credible. For the moment, the knowledge of artificial intelligence is limited to 2021, so it is unable to know the news. It also gives false or incomplete answers, which poses a real problem in terms of the spread of fake news. In addition, she still has a rather poor style and vocabulary, and her answers can be biased, even discriminatory. The OpenAI president also explained in a tweet that relying on ChatGPT for anything serious was for the moment “a mistake“. Still, it is a very promising technology, but it still needs to be developed and improved before it can actually be used.

For its part, even if it is cautious about this type of technology so as not to tarnish its reputation, Google has big plans for its AIs for 2023. It is working in particular on AlphaCode, which is capable of coding as well as a beginner programmer, and LaMDa, a conversational AI so promising that some researchers are convinced that it has a soul – the Mountain View firm takes a lot of precautions for its development, so we are not likely to use it anytime soon.