Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On the evening of January 16, Beijing time, it is reported that Microsoft is considering investing 10 billion US dollars in OpenAI, a San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) research company. Analysts say the potential deal could be a decisive one in a new era of artificial intelligence.

If Microsoft is right to bet on the far-reaching impact of artificial intelligence technology, the deal could also trigger a restructuring of the artificial intelligence world, as other technology companies compete for their place in new areas of "generative artificial intelligence" (Generative AI).

Last month, OpenAI became the focus of global attention with the launch of an intelligent chat robot system, ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence system that can answer questions and generate text in a language that sounds natural.

ChatGPT quickly got the attention of Microsoft. Microsoft executives believe that the technology behind the service will soon have a deeper impact on the tech world as a whole.

"these AI models will change the way people interact with computers," said Eric Boyd, director of Microsoft's artificial intelligence platform. "talking to computers is as natural as talking to people, which will revolutionize people's daily experience of using technology. It can understand your intentions in an unprecedented way and output them in a computer-operated way."

It was reported last week that Microsoft planned to invest $10 billion in OpenAI to acquire a significant minority stake (about 49 per cent). When the investment is completed, OpenAI will be valued at $29 billion.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Microsoft, a potential landmark investment already using OpenAI technology, comes at a time when investment booms such as blockchains and digital cryptocurrencies have receded, and venture capitalists are scrambling to support the latest artificial intelligence technology.

Back in 2019, Microsoft made its first $1 billion investment in OpenAI. Since then, Microsoft has also used OpenAI technology in some of its products, including text generation system GPT-3, image generation system Dall-E 2 and programming assistance system.

Artificial intelligence experts say the speed at which these artificial intelligence tools move from advanced research projects to everyday products may be unprecedented in the history of science and technology. For example, Codex,2021 was only mentioned in a research paper by OpenAI in the middle of every year, but in less than a year, Microsoft turned it into a commercial subscription service.

According to Microsoft's code hosting platform GitHub CEO Thomas Domke (Thomas Dohmke), developers using Copilot services (GitHub's AI becomes a tool) generate 40 per cent of their code automatically by artificial intelligence systems, which halves the time it takes to create new code. Obviously, this is a huge leap in efficiency.

"Zero sample Learning" makes it possible that most of the techniques for OpenAI stem from the creation of so-called "large language models", which are trained with a lot of text. Unlike the early forms of machine learning that dominated artificial intelligence over the past decade, the technology has increased their commercial value by creating systems that can be used in a wider range of environments.

"the real power of these models is that they can accomplish a lot of different tasks at the same time," said Boyd, head of Microsoft's artificial intelligence platform. This makes it possible to carry out so-called "zero sample learning", that is, the direct use of artificial intelligence in new tasks without the need to train them.

Google and other technology giants, as well as some start-ups, have also invested a lot of resources in creating such large artificial intelligence models. But since 2020, when GPT3 shocked the artificial intelligence world with its ability to generate chunks of text on demand, OpenAI has led the market with a series of high-profile public demonstrations.

Wider use of artificial intelligence now, Microsoft executives are seeking to use artificial intelligence technology in a wider range of products. Late last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Satya Nadella) predicted that "generative artificial intelligence" would lead us to a world where everyone, regardless of his profession, could be technologically supported in everything he did.

Oren Etzioni, a consultant and board member of A12, an artificial intelligence research firm founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says that "generative artificial intelligence" will be a core part of productivity applications such as Microsoft Office. In the future, these applications can display relevant information to users, check their work, and provide automatic content generation services.

Clearly, Microsoft's competitors have not ignored the dramatic changes that artificial intelligence technology may bring to the software market. instead, they see the technology as a rare opportunity to break into a market dominated by large technology companies.

Emad Mostaque, director of Stability AI, a London-based artificial intelligence research firm, says Stability AI is building a "PowerPoint killer". Its products are based on artificial intelligence technology and are designed to make presentations easier than the widely used Microsoft PowerPoint.

For Microsoft, this is both defensive and offensive. First of all, Microsoft should protect the position of established products such as Office, and consolidate its position in the market such as Internet search. But at the same time, with this potential investment, Microsoft is also trying to use its technical and financial strength to position itself as "the main platform for building the next era of artificial intelligence".

An investor in OpenAI, with a minority of giants, says OpenAI needs more cloud computing power than startups or venture capital investors can do. This means that OpenAI has no choice but to seek financial support from a small number of technology giants.

But if a handful of tech giants become investors or core platforms for "start-ups to build the next generation of artificial intelligence technology", it could raise concerns among regulators.

A person familiar with the matter said Microsoft's alliance with OpenAI was likely to be closely watched by regulators, but also pointed out that the current potential minority investment should not trigger any regulatory intervention.

But as owners of major cloud computing platforms need to support the upcoming era of "generative artificial intelligence", large technology companies seem inevitably to have a say in the future of the market.

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