According to a report, Microsoft plans to further implement ChatGPT in Office products.
Tech leak specialist website The Information revealed last week, citing two anonymous sources, that Microsoft plans to upgrade its Bing search engine with ChatGPT. A follow-up report now describes an even deeper integration of ChatGPT into Microsoft products.
ChatGPT as general purpose Office help
According to The Information, the two companies are in talks to integrate ChatGPT into Microsoft's Office products such as Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint. Here ChatGPT could generate or complete text templates, correct style, contribute translations and more - an extremely flexible writing and design aid with feedback function.
The web app ChatBCG, for example, demonstrates how an OpenAI API can be used to automatically create PowerPoint presentations based only on a thematic specification in the prompt.
Microsoft has already been using large Transformer-based language models for text and correction suggestions or automatic responses in Outlook and Microsoft Teams for some time. It is not known whether and to what extent OpenAI technology is already used in this.
The integration of ChatGPT into Office could help Microsoft to expand its supremacy in the office software sector. However, it would not necessarily ensure further growth.
For this, Microsoft would have to open up new markets with AI or take market share from the competition - for example, in web search. It is possible that Microsoft can offer a supplementary search function in Office through ChatGPT, so that the search detour via Google is no longer necessary.
However, Microsoft would have to answer questions about the additional monetization of such a service and the reliability of the information provided by the language model. This challenge also applies to other companies that want to deploy large language models without too much supervision.
The investment in OpenAI could pay off many times over for Microsoft
Microsoft entered OpenAI in 2019 with a $1 billion investment, bought an exclusive license to GPT-3 in September 2020, and is reportedly interested in another investment.
It already looks like Microsoft can put OpenAI's technology to profitable use. Microsoft sells customized GPT-3 interfaces for enterprises through its Azure platform. In addition, the Github code AI Copilot is built on OpenAI's Codex model, which in turn is a derivative of GPT-3. DALL-E 2 is integrated with Bing's Image Creator tools.
If AI delivers on its promise, Microsoft may have made one of the smartest moves in its corporate history with its early investment in OpenAI.
