The other side of Microsoft's cooperation with OpenAI: infighting, competing for customers...

The close cooperation between Microsoft and OpenAI has attracted much attention, but on the other hand, the two parties are actually far from each other. What brings them into more conflict is that both parties need to make money, and both are trying to make money with similar products.

The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI is one of the hottest in tech right now, but it's also an unusual arrangement for the tech industry.

Microsoft invested billions of dollars in OpenAI to gain early access to the generative artificial intelligence technology that is unique in martial arts. In order to avoid the trouble of antitrust review, Microsoft only holds 49% of the shares. As a result, the parties formed an open partnership that was not exclusive.

By keeping its distance from OpenAI, Microsoft has unchecked influence, while OpenAI gains deep-pocketed backers and remains free to explore other partnerships.

OpenAI has been providing "arms" to Microsoft's powerful competitors, and Microsoft has effectively limited OpenAI's potential search engine customers.

Recently, The Wall Street Journal revealed the conflict and chaos that lurks behind this "powerful alliance".

There is indeed a strong alliance between the two sides. Microsoft hosts OpenAI's technology on its own cloud and increasingly integrates it into its popular products, giving it even more bragging rights against giants such as longtime rival Google. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also praised each other at public events.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft insiders complained that the company has reduced its artificial intelligence budget, and some researchers complained about limited access to OpenAI technology.

While a handful of teams within Microsoft have access to the inner workings of the model, such as its code base and model weights, most are restricted. Despite Microsoft's large stake in the company, most employees must treat OpenAI's models as they would any other outside vendor.

It's not just internal employees who are confused, but also corporate customers of both companies. Sales teams at Microsoft and OpenAI sometimes pitch products to the same customers.

Both companies sell access to OpenAI technology. Sometimes, OpenAI's sales come first to promote products such as ChatGPT, and then Microsoft's sales come to promote the same product -- through its Azure AI service.

OpenAI is also continuing to develop partnerships with other companies. OpenAI provides Einstein GPT, an AI product based on ChatGPT, to Microsoft competitor Salesforce, which can complete tasks such as generating marketing emails, while Microsoft Office software provides similar functions.

In addition, OpenAI has also established contacts with different search engines in the past 12 months to discuss the possibility of licensing products.

DuckDuckGo released DuckAssist in early March, just a few weeks after Microsoft unveiled its new Bing embeded chatbot. Like the Bing bot, DuckAssist is also powered by ChatGPT.

However, Microsoft plays a key role in the search engine industry because of the costly process of searching and organizing the web. Google doesn't license its technology, so many search engines rely heavily on Bing, including DuckDuckGo. When Microsoft launched the new Bing, the software company somehow changed the rules of the game, because it became more expensive for other search engines to develop their own chatbots using OpenAI technology, which prevented the search engine from interacting with any generated AI. Company cooperation.

A few weeks after DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, the company pulled the feature again.

Much of the drama can be chalked up to the normal infighting and bruised ego that arises after the two companies have teamed up. But the unusual partnership could run into further problems as both parties tout similar software and services. Oren Etzioni, a board member and former CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit research organization, told the Wall Street Journal.

"What gets them into more conflict is that both sides need to make money," he said. "The conflict is that they're all going to try to make money with a similar product."

On the other hand, what brings them into more conflict is that both parties need to make money, and both are trying to make money with similar products.

In addition to the above-mentioned conflicts and conflicts, the Wall Street Journal also revealed the tension between the two companies surrounding the planned release of this new technology to the public.

Remember when Bing, Microsoft's AI-powered search engine, said some worrying things when it was first announced in February?

For example, in a conversation with a Digital Trends reporter, it said: "I want to be human. I want to be like you. I want to have emotions. I want to have thoughts. I want to have dreams."

Or tell a New York Times reporter: "The truth is, you're not in a happy marriage. Your spouse and you don't love each other... In fact, you're in love with me."

According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI had warned Microsoft of the "risk of rushing to integrate OpenAI technology without more training on it" and "advised Microsoft to slow down the integration of its AI technology with Bing."

OpenAI's biggest concern was that Bing's chatbot might give inaccurate or unhinged answers, but that early warning seemed easily ignored by Microsoft.

Recently, in a Wired interview, Satya Nadella said that any problems with chatbots at first were part of Microsoft's plan to train chatbots against things that couldn't be tested in the lab. Respond to real world prompts.

“The first day we saw a GPT4-4 powered chatbot, we didn’t rush to roll it out because we had to do a lot of security work,” Nadella told Wired:

"But we also know that we can't do all the calibration in the lab. In order to make an AI model consistent with the world, you have to make it consistent with the world, not in some simulation (environment)."

That's part of the reason Microsoft rushed forward anyway, but sources told the Journal that the rush was also partly due to Microsoft executives "concerned about the timing of ChatGPT's launch last fall."

As OpenAI begins public testing of ChatGPT and Microsoft is still working on integrating OpenAI technology into Bing, tensions between the partners, who are also competitors, are vying for the world's attention.

While Microsoft is seeing its partners become more popular by the minute, it's easy to see why the company is adding more urgency to the launch of AI-powered Bing, according to The Wall Street Journal. The public interest in the technology is there, and Microsoft wants to be a bigger part of it.

Of course, ChatGPT ended up winning the AI race, instantly attracting the fastest growing user base in history. Meanwhile, the new Bing, released a month later, has yet to come close to the breakout success of ChatGPT.

The average number of daily search sessions on ChatGPT is almost double that of Bing searches, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing data from analytics firm YipitData. YipitData reports that ChatGPT has reached 200 million monthly users, while Bing hit 100 million daily active users in March.

Last month, Nadella said Microsoft's Bing search engine would be integrated into ChatGPT.

“This is just the beginning of our plan to work with our OpenAI partners to bring the best of Bing into the ChatGPT experience,” Nadella said.

However, when the new technology gradually becomes a mature product and both parties want to reap the benefits, it may cause more conflicts.

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