Microsoft is betting on ChatGPT to steal Google’s AI crown

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Among the major tech companies, Amazon, Facebook, and primarily Google have led research into artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years — not to mention projects by Bytedance (owner of TikTok), Spotify, Twitter, and other lesser-known companies. Now, however, the conflict must win a rearrangement of forces as the technological leadership of an old acquaintance of the masses resumes: Microsoft.

It’s not that the company founded by Bill Gates has stalled in this sector. Over the years, the company’s research division has evolved from chatbots (chatbots) to digital assistants, including solutions to some of its most popular products, such as Word and Excel. However, Microsoft has achieved few major results and has seen the gap widen between some of its major competitors over the past decade.

It was a move Satya Nadella made in 2019 that seems to be changing the landscape of AI these days. That year, the CEO of Microsoft decided to invest 1 billion US dollars in the US company OpenAI. At the time, the AI ​​Research Lab, founded in 2015, was just another name trying to develop algorithms at a basic research pace — that is, with no practical applications in sight.

Four years later, OpenAI, already with a commercial vision for its projects, has become the hottest name in the tech world. The company is behind ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of generating highly complex scripts from simple commands typed by a human. From wedding speeches to organizing lists, the service’s ability has taken the entire AI sector to another level — launched on November 30, the bot reached 1 million users in just a few days.

The launch of ChatGPT wasn’t the only advancement for OpenAI in 2022. In April, the company announced DALL-E 2, an artificial intelligence capable of creating gorgeous images from simple text commands, which inspired other models of AI such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. . Before that, OpenAI released GPT-3, a model capable of generating text trained from millions of pieces of data, from Wikipedia articles to posts on social networks – in the end, the system recorded 175 billion parameters (mathematical representation patterns and text types). ChatGPT uses GPT-3 as the “brain”.

All of this work has put OpenAI at the forefront of a sector called “generative AI,” meaning that AI doesn’t just consume data and point out trends, as it has been doing until now. Systems are now also capable of creating original content, a trend that should only gain strength from now on. Microsoft intends to redirect its business through OpenAI generative AIs.

partnership

A week ago, Microsoft confirmed a new investment in OpenAI – although the amount is not confirmed, the US press says that 10 billion US dollars will be disbursed in the coming years. With the popularity of ChatGPT, OpenAI has been harassed by investors, and market analysts have indicated that this could make the company worth $29 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups in the United States.

However, Microsoft has more to offer than money. In the official announcement of the partnership, the companies revealed that the Windows owner will build supercomputers and provide cloud infrastructure so that OpenAI can develop its own intelligent models. In return, Microsoft will be able to implement the startup’s AI systems into its products, such as Teams and Office.

“In the race for artificial intelligence, Nadella and his company are ahead of other tech giants. This investment is a huge step in that dispute. ChatGPT could be a game-changer for Microsoft,” analyst Dan Ives of consulting firm Wedbush wrote in a note to investors.

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