🤖 #51: Microsoft ♥️ OpenAI

Greetings, fellow humans. 👋

This is Not A Bot - the newsletter about AI that was definitely not written by AI. I’m Haroon, founder of AI For Anyone, and I’ll be sharing with you the latest news, tools, and resources from the AI space.

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Microsoft ♥️ OpenAI

The biggest AI news of last week is that Microsoft is planning to incorporate OpenAI technology into their suite of products, including Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint. 

What might this look like in practice? It could mean:

• better email search functionality in Outlook, which helps you find the emails you're looking for without having to use exact keywords,

• AI-powered text suggestions in Word to make writing faster, and maybe even

• AI-generated PowerPoint slide templates.

Maybe, just maybe, this will signal the return of our favorite enterprise SaaS mascot...

"Don't call it a comeback." - Clippy

A brief history

A formal relationship between the two orgs dates back to 2019, when Microsoft invested $1bn into OpenAI.

In addition to the investment, Microsoft also agreed to front the cost of training and running OpenAI's massive AI models (on Microsoft Azure servers).

In exchange, Microsoft has the right to use OpenAI's tech in their own products.

Shockwaves in the AI-generative tool industry

For Microsoft suite users, getting AI-features in-product may eliminate the need for speciality tools that productize OpenAI technologies (e.g. Jasper, Copy.ai, etc.).

The future of some generative-AI companies like Jasper.ai — who have built their entire business around (arguably) commoditized technologies — is in jeopardy. Their entire businesses may end up competing with tiny features in the overall Microsoft suite.

AI is not a moat, and it will be interesting to see how they adapt and respond.

For Microsoft, their partnership with OpenAI may end up being one of the best decisions in their company's history.

They already have the distribution. They have the scale (which is massively important for creating best-in-class ML models). They've massively improved their UI/UX to catch up with the Google Suite's and Notion's of the world over the past few years.

With the addition of best-in-class AI features, this may signal the start of the new and improved Microsoft era.

Favorite Reads

• ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools (article link)

• Apple enables AI-generated audiobook narration (PR link)

• Stanford HAI's top 5 predictions about AI in 2023 (article link)

• AI is used to persuade legislation (article link)

• A skeptical take on the AI revolution (podcast link)

• The costs of running ChatGPT (Twitter thread)

• VALL-E, a new text-to-speech model from Microsoft (Twitter thread)

• How GPT-3 will make organizing notes unnecessary (article link)

New Tools

• GPTDuck - answer questions against any Github repo (Twitter thread link)

• Kiwi - AI-powered summaries, questions, and quizzes from videos (Twitter thread link)

• WebChatGPT - augment ChatGPT with data from after the 2021 training data cutoff (Twitter thread link)

• Magician by Diagram - Write and edit copy in Figma. (Twitter thread link)

• Codeium - Code completion in Jupyter notebooks (article link)

• PeopleAI - Converse with some of human history’s most influential and significant figures and learn. (link)

• AIHelperBot - build SQL queries using natural language (landing page link)

Thought-provoking tweet

Greg Brockman, President & Co-founder of OpenAI, thinks AI advancement in 2023 will far exceed what we saw in 2022...

Watch this space 👀

And that does it for this week’s issue.

As always, thanks for reading, and see you next time. ✌️

- Haroon - (definitely) Not A Robot and @haroonchoudery on Twitter