The Tribune

By CHRIS ILLING

CCO @ ActivTrades Corp

Artificial intelligence (AI) was an often-used word on Wall Street last week.

A few days after Microsoft announced the lay-off of 10,000 employees, a billion dollar deal was unveiled. The company revealed last Monday that it had made a “multi-year, billion dollar investment” in OpenAI, a company which develops products such as ChatGPT.

The software from OpenAI has been available free of charge since November 2022. Within a week, over one million users tried to get the ChatBot to chat. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, and is the prototype of a chatbot, which is a text-based dialogue system as a user interface based on machine learning. The AI is being trained with an enormous amount of data. The system can respond to human text input. Simple knowledge questions can be answered on command, but computer code can also be written, or a business plan drawn up.

The investment amounts to $10bn according to insiders. Microsoft had already invested $1bn during the start-up phase. In the meantime, founder Sam Altman has changed the company structure so that part of the OpenAI team is allowed to generate profits. The company describes itself as a “limited profit” firm. This structure will remain after the investment by Microsoft.

Analysts, however, see the partnership for Microsoft as an opportunity to earn a lot of money. Because ChatGPT is one of the most innovative AI technologies in the industry, Microsoft is acting aggressively on this front and does not want to be left behind on this potentially game-changing AI investment.

Microsoft announced earlier this month that it intends to integrate ChatGPT into its Azure cloud service. In addition, Microsoft wants to make the service available to all its business customers after the OpenAI applications were initially only available to selected users.

The text generator, ChatGPT, and the image generator, DALL-E 2, are among the best-known AI models from the research organisation founded by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other investors. The partnership is now entering its third phase, as Microsoft announced. It will expand the development and use of specialised supercomputer systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent research. There is speculation about an integration of the technology in Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, as well as in the Office products.

But this amazing technology also carries a lot of risks. Job loss, for example. And also the creation of nonsense and ideological colouring. So far, little is known about how ChatGPT chooses the texts that go into its responses. The AI is based on the number of texts and opinions that are available on the Internet on a topic. In extreme cases, this means that if more people claimed that the earth is flat than round, ChatGPT could adopt this misinformation.

The savvy investor will keep an eye on AI.