BREAKING: Microsoft acquires OpenAI & ChatGPT

Hi all

I know it’s not Thursday. 

But this is not your ordinary week in AI. 

Twitter is on FIRE right now on the news that Microsoft is in talks about acquiring 49% of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. 

This is HUGE.

Let’s talk about it…

Microsoft acquires 49% of OpenAI

This morning, the news broke about Microsoft being in talks to acquire 49% of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. 

ChatGPT was our main story in the first edition of The Practical AI Newsletter.

Only last week, the news broke that Bing, Microsoft’s search engine and Google’s “biggest” competitor (well, 93% vs. 3%), was working on incorporating ChatGPT into their search engine. 

Now this??? 

We are only 10 days into 2023, and we have all this big news that is shaking up the world of AI. 

This will have a huge impact on business and work!

And Microsoft is shaping up to become the big winner of the AI game. 

At least so it seems. 

Google has yet to show its hand… 

Here are the reasons why Microsoft is winning the AI game (right now):

• $1bn investment in OpenAI (2019).

• OpenAI is run on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform (and a big competitor of Amazon's AWS cloud platform).

• Owns GitHub which released Copilot, a cloud-based AI tool.

• Dall-E powers Bing Image Creator (Dall-E is an OpenAI product).

• Vall-E, a brand new AI voice tool that can produce a replica of your voice from 3s input (I will talk about this in this week’s newsletter -  another breaking story).

• ChatGPT integration into Bing.

• ChatGPT gets integrated into all the MS products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Windows, Teams, Sharepoint, Xbox, etc. 

• $10bn investment into OpenAI for 49%.

• Negotiates a sweet deal of 75% profit share until they recoup their $10bn investment.

The applications are easy to see. 

Microsoft is the largest business software company in the world, and “everyone” is using its Office suite of tools, and most PCs run on their Windows operating system. 

Imagine how ChatGPT can speed up your work in Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. 

The AI will learn (get trained) how you write and work. 

This again will allow you to:

• Write faster in Word.

• Reply quickly and semi-automatically to emails inside Outlook.

• Generate PowerPoint presentations quickly from content you already know and have created before in a Word document.

• Ask the AI to generate complicated formulas in Excel. 

• Having “AI internet search” inside the document you are working on eliminating the need to “Google” stuff.

I am not even going to go down the rabbit hole of how AI can be integrated into Microsoft’s Windows operating system. 

Or their gaming console Xbox, which is no. 2 in the world (almost 13% of the market). 

Or their game developers.

Or their enterprise solutions.

Or their phones.

Or Skype.

And I am sure they are working on software for self-driving cars too. 

The possibilities are endless. 

I think this is a brilliant strategic move by Microsoft. 

But I must admit I am not sure this much power should be in the hands of the already largest software company in the World…

I created a picture of Bill Gates in the future with Stable Diffusion AI.

What do you think about today's news?

How do you think this will affect business and work? 

Hit reply and let me know. 

A “funny” anecdote about one of Microsoft’s first forays into AI  

In 2016 Microsoft released an AI chatbot for Twitter called Tay. 

It was an experiment in “conversational understanding.” 

The idea was that the more you chat with Tay, the smarter it gets. 

It was supposed to learn through “casual and playful conversation.” 

In less than 24 hours, the Twitter crowd corrupted the innocent AI chatbot, turning it into a racist asshole, and Microsoft had to pull the plug!

Read the full story over at the Verge.

That’s all for this unscheduled newsletter. 

I hope you forgive me for sending you two emails this week. 

On Thursday, you will receive the regularly scheduled newsletter. It will be a great one, as I will introduce you to an AI company from my hometown in Norway. 

If you have any questions about AI or any feedback, just hit reply or tweet me @thomassorheim 

PS! Why did the computer go to the doctor?

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.

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Because it had Windows pains!

This is not the end. It is where the fun begins!