I Think The Australian Financial Review Asked And Then Answered The Question We Are All Asking About ChatGPT.

Yesterday the lead on the front page was:

The question was “ChatGPT – Revolution or Hype?”  Others have also asked, in similar vein "is ChatGPT a form of magic or the apocalypse?"

There was then a secondary question: “How will ChatGPT change the world?”

Chat GPT’s answer to that is pretty balanced and sensible:

“ChatGPT is a tool that can be used to generate human-like text. This technology has the potential to be used in a wide range of applications, such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and automated content generation. It could also be used in areas like customer service, marketing, and education. By automating certain tasks and making it easier to generate large amounts of high-quality text, ChatGPT has the potential to improve efficiency and productivity in many industries. Additionally, it could make it possible for people to interact with technology in more natural, human-like ways. However, it's important to note that ChatGPT is just a tool, and its impact will depend on how it's used and implemented in the real world.”

In the AFR we got a pretty clear answer to the headline question a day or so earlier too!

Microsoft invests $14b in ChatGPT maker OpenAI

Dina Bass

Jan 24, 2023 – 3.11am

Seattle | Microsoft is investing $US10 billion ($14 billion) in OpenAI, whose artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT has lit up the internet since its introduction in November, amassing more than a million users within days and touching off a fresh debate over the role of AI in the workplace.

The new support, building on $US1 billion Microsoft poured into OpenAI in 2019 and another round in 2021, is intended to give Microsoft access to some of the most popular and advanced artificial intelligence systems.

Microsoft is competing with Alphabet, Amazon.com and Meta Platforms to dominate the fast-growing technology that generates text, images and other media in response to a short prompt.

At the same time, OpenAI needs Microsoft’s funding and cloud-computing power to crunch massive volumes of data and run the increasingly complex models that allow programs like DALL-E to generate realistic images based on a handful of words, and ChatGPT to create astonishingly human-like conversational text.

While Microsoft didn’t give details of the new investment, a person familiar with the discussions, who asked not to be identified, said it totals $US10 billion over multiple years. The shares gained 1 per cent to $US242.58 in New York on Monday (Tuesday AEDT).

The deal will give a boost to Microsoft’s Azure cloud, while providing OpenAI with additional specially designed supercomputers to run its complex AI models and fuel its research. Microsoft plans to use OpenAI’s models throughout consumer and corporate products and release new categories of products based on OpenAI’s work, the two companies said in blog posts.

The Azure usage fuelled by this deal is key for Microsoft as it battles to expand that business, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana. “This could even help Microsoft close the gap further with AWS,” he said, referring to Amazon’s market-leading cloud service.

OpenAI noted on Monday that it uses Microsoft’s cloud-based service Azure to train all of its models and that Microsoft’s investment will allow it to accelerate its independent research. Azure will remain the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI, the company said.

The deal has a complicated structure because investors in OpenAI are limited in the return on their investment since it is a capped-for profit company.

Microsoft will get nearly half of OpenAI’s financial returns until its investment is repaid up to a predetermined cap, one of the people said. All profits beyond what is owed to investors and employees are returned to OpenAI, which is governed by the OpenAI non-profit organisation.

Microsoft earlier this month said it planned to add ChatGPT to Azure and announced the broad availability of its Azure OpenAI Service, which has been an option to a limited set of customers since it was unveiled in 2021.

The service gives Microsoft’s cloud customers access to various OpenAI tools like the GPT-3.5 language system that ChatGPT is based on, as well as the DALL-E model for generating images from text prompts. That enables Azure customers to use the OpenAI products in their own applications running in the cloud.

Microsoft itself is currently using the developer’s language AI to add automation to its Copilot programming tool, and wants to add such technology to its Bing search engine, Office productivity applications, Teams chat program and security software. The company is putting DALL-E into design software and offering it to Azure cloud customers.

Lots more here::

https://www.afr.com/technology/microsoft-invests-14b-in-chatgpt-maker-openai-20230124-p5cex0

That $US 10 Billion is pretty impressive until you realise the Market Cap of the company is $1.85 Trillion!

So we can conclude that MS is making a significant but not company changing investment in ChatGPT.

For that reason I reckon we all will need to just setting in for a wait of 1-2 years to see what comes of it all and to see if it was worth it! The way things are moving we will probably have a different question top of mind by then! Nevertheless, from the above it is clear MS has pretty big plans! I do worry about many of the jobs ChatGPT cited....

If MS thinks ChatGPT is a revolution and not hype, it probably is!

Buckle in/up!

David.