Microsoft said this week that it will fund OpenAI, which is at the forefront of generative AI, with a multibillion-dollar investment that includes supercomputer development.
Microsoft Corp. sought to reassure investors on Tuesday that its significant investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is paying off, despite the fact that economic uncertainty is prompting Microsoft customers to examine their cloud spending.
Early evidence can be seen in the use of GitHub Copilot, a little-discussed application that can create computer code for programmers.
When the tool was made available to the general public in June of last year, it quickly attracted 400,000 subscribers. More than a million individuals have used Copilot, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who made the claim on Tuesday.
Following a projection that the current quarter’s cloud computing revenue will be somewhat below Wall Street estimates, Microsoft shares modestly declined in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
However, Copilot’s success is a preliminary sign that consumers will pay for so-called generative AI, or technology that can generate text, images, or in this case, computer code when instructed after learning the skill from a massive body of data.
The CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub, which can write up to 35% or 40% of a file’s code when enabled, claimed last year that Copilot gives programmers suggestions for what to do next. According to a blog post on the GitHub website, it costs $100 a year for individual subscribers or can be invoiced through a business account.
Copilot itself depends on OpenAI’s technology, as does ChatGPT, a popular chatbot that Open AI published last year. According to Microsoft, ChatGPT, which can write code as well as essays or poetry, would be accessible through its cloud.
When improved, ChatGPT may possibly answer any user inquiry, giving Microsoft’s Bing search engine a chance to challenge market leader Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc. According to a recent article, Google is developing a significant AI launch of its own.
According to Nadella, the Azure OpenAI Service, which makes startup technology available via Microsoft’s cloud, has already drawn 200 clients, including KPMG and Al Jazeera.
