In case you don’t know how Microsoft feels about AI, here’s what CEO Satya Nadella has to say: “They love the AI.” they like it very much. In the company’s annual report, he writes a letter to shareholders promoting AI in every possible way. It’s not difficult to understand why. He clearly believes that this is the biggest, and perhaps only, advancement in computing that really matters in more than a decade.
Microsoft’s business is healthy, but it’s no wonder it seems a little idle. The company’s efforts to enter mobile, search, and hardware have all stalled or failed, and numerous product experiments have failed to penetrate their respective markets.
On the other hand, the company’s cloud business is so strong that it has increasingly shaped the company and its products around that premise. But even that success was beginning to fade. Although profitability is high, there is limited room for innovation.
They have certainly been paying attention to trends over the years and determining whether it is worth adopting some new developments. Social web? No, I have too much work. Fitness? Infrastructure becomes simpler. Blockchain? Redundant and risky. Metaverse? very interesting.
Like a gentle surfer, Microsoft waited, rocking gently. Then a wave of AI rose up beneath them and they began rowing for their lives.
right place at right time
Mr. Nadella wrote in his annual letter::
This next generation of AI will reshape every software category and every business, including ours. Forty-eight years after its founding, Microsoft remains an important company. This is because we have adapted to technology paradigm shifts multiple times, from PC/server to web/internet to cloud/mobile. Today, we are doing so again as we lead in this new era.
Below are dozens of examples of how AI is being deployed across all lines of business, products, and long-term initiatives. This is not a hobby for Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft has decided that this is the next step in personal and business computing.
And it’s not just an enabler, such as advances in silicon that double the efficiency of data center operations or double the lifespan of batteries. In other words, they are transformers.
The long arc of computing has been shaped in many ways by the pursuit of increasingly intuitive human-computer interfaces, such as keyboards, mice, and touch screens. I believe we are now reaching the next big step forward in natural language, and we will soon move beyond it to see, hear, interpret, and understand our intentions and the world around us. It will be.
It looks like there are stars in his eyes. Imagine being at the top of a major technology company like Microsoft in the midst of so much turmoil. They’ve dabbled with the idea of moving beyond the mouse and keyboard before, but so far natural language interfaces (such as Cortana) and alternative hardware (such as HoloLens) have failed to do the parlor trick. Not over the level.
But through luck or foresight, they happened to end up backing OpenAI, a breakthrough leader in natural language AI. Not only does this technology actually look like a real game-changer, but watching the cookie crumble gives long-time rival Google a fair look. Google, on the other hand, is being hamstrung by the rapid transition to AI, even though it created the concept internally to make it possible. They’re trying to bounce back, but the company has always struggled to come together under a coherent concept, and this time may be no different.
This partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI makes both free. OpenAI has attracted a combination of investors and customers with virtually bottomless capital and a genuine desire to integrate AI tools into every corner of their business. By simply presenting its market-leading product as its own, Microsoft is actually spared the embarrassing inevitability of being far behind in AI development. Nadella did not mention that Microsoft is training its own underlying models, but it is doing so covertly to prevent backstabbing as Microsoft’s efforts pale in comparison to the forward momentum of the partnership. Probably.
Imagine if the situation were reversed and Google struck a fortuitous deal with OpenAI that sent Microsoft into a corner. Microsoft is in an even tougher situation than Google, having to spend a fraction of the effort building LLM, and for every month it spends trying to catch up, it has to wait for its competitors to gain an extra million users. I saw it.
It is therefore no surprise that Microsoft is spending huge amounts of money to strengthen its position and expand and deepen its partnership with OpenAI wherever possible.
Torpedoes are shit
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, July 15, 2019. (Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures)
But one issue Nadella pointed to is the second of two breakthroughs he believes will define this era of AI: “the emergence of powerful new inference engines.” It was a characterization.
If you’re even remotely familiar with how this generation of AI models work, you’ll know that they’re not. reasonmore than a calculator reason When you ask to multiply two numbers.
Of course, Mr. Nadella is not naive or ignorant on this issue. He knows what he’s getting at here. This means that these systems perform functions that are in many ways indistinguishable from reasoning. It feels like magic to ask a computer to summarize a long text document and have it do it, or even summarize it in iambic pentameter. Because, until recently, only people with reasoning abilities could do it.
After all, patterns in language are sufficiently predictable that some inference tasks can be reduced to statistical tasks. There’s no need for Yuri to have any magical ideas, as this alone is remarkable enough.
But this language suggests that AI systems are giving backers like Microsoft a confidence they probably didn’t have. They have so many capabilities, but they’ve only been around for a few years and are still in their infancy. Sure, they will become more capable, but we will also learn their limitations. That would probably be the case only if the limits were already creating serious harm.
As AI ethicists have repeatedly warned, the risk of AI lies in overconfidence and informed application of current systems, rather than future apocalypses or theoretical systems that replace entire industries. A CEO with stars in his eyes could do great damage if he uses an AI model that is essentially not competent enough to do it himself.
The balancing act that Microsoft has to perform is to invest at a pace that keeps it ahead of its competitors, but not to fall into a minefield while everyone else watches from afar. It’s the curse of the innovator (in this case, the integrator) to be the first to face new risks, and Microsoft seems poised to play this role by bringing AI to almost every business I know. Units and products may be included.
Where can I buy it? Where do we fail miserably? Where can a lawsuit be filed? Where will it be regulated and disappear? Satya Nadella doesn’t know, but by God he and his shareholders will find out anyway. Things are getting exciting again.