Generative AI
Microsoft Revenue Up 2 Percent, but Profit Drops 12 Percent - The New York Times
The past several months have been turbulent for Microsoft. In December, its $69 billion deal to acquire the video game maker Activision was challenged by regulators in the United States, and last week it began laying off about 10,000 workers. On Monday, Microsoft announced a major new investment in OpenAI, the start-up behind ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence breakthroughs, and signaled plans to include A.I. in an array of Microsoft products. The biggest slowdown came from Microsoft's personal computing business, where sales fell 19 percent and operating income fell 47 percent. The business boomed during the first part of the pandemic.
Microsoft announces $52.7 billion in Q2 revenue amid plans to layoff 10,000 workers
Like many big tech companies, Microsoft is preparing for the worst after announcing plans to lay off 10,000 employees in the upcoming third quarter. It turns out that the company's second quarter was a mixed bag: It earned $52.7 billion in revenue, which was up 2 percent from last year, but a slight miss from the $52.9 billion analysts expected. Profits also fell by 12 percent to $16.4 billion, a trend that may continue throughout the year. Despite the faltering PC market, Microsoft has been riding high on cloud revenues for years, and that seems to be continuing. Microsoft's belt tightening didn't stop the company from potentially investing $10 billion more in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, yet another sign that AI is going to play a major role in its future projects. The company plans to add ChatGPT to its Azure OpenAI service soon, and it's reportedly planning to integrated that technology in Bing.
Microsoft to Invest $10 Billion in OpenAI, the Creator of ChatGPT - The New York Times
The fruit of more than a decade of research inside companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta, these technologies are poised to remake everything from online search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing to photo and graphics editors like Photoshop. The deal follows Microsoft's announcement last week that it had begun laying off employees as part of an effort to cull 10,000 positions. The changes, including severance, ending leases and what it called "changes to our hardware portfolio" would cost $1.2 billion, it said. Satya Nadella, the company's chief executive, said last week that the cuts would let the company refocus on priorities such as artificial intelligence, which he called "the next major wave of computing." Mr. Nadella made clear in his company's announcement on Monday that the next phase of the partnership with OpenAI would focus on bringing tools to the market, saying that "developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best A.I. infrastructure, models and tool chain."
AI and the future of work: 5 experts on what ChatGPT, DALL-E and other AI tools mean for artists and knowledge workers
From steam power and electricity to computers and the internet, technological advancements have always disrupted labor markets, pushing out some jobs while creating others. Artificial intelligence remains something of a misnomer โ the smartest computer systems still don't actually know anything โ but the technology has reached an inflection point where it's poised to affect new classes of jobs: artists and knowledge workers. Specifically, the emergence of large language models โ AI systems that are trained on vast amounts of text โ means computers can now produce human-sounding written language and convert descriptive phrases into realistic images. The Conversation asked five artificial intelligence researchers to discuss how large language models are likely to affect artists and knowledge workers. And, as our experts noted, the technology is far from perfect, which raises a host of issues โ from misinformation to plagiarism โ that affect human workers.
Popular AI "ChatGPT" goes paid - Global News Pakistan
New York, 23 January 2023 (GNP): Microsoft-backed OpenAI has released a paid version of its popular AI software ChatGPT named "ChatGPT Professional." It is now available at $42 per month. The founding company of ChatGPT, OpenAI, announced its plans to monetize ChatGPT a week ago. The upgraded yet'experimental' version of ChatGPT claims to be available during high demand, with no blackout windows, priority access to new features, a faster response rate, no throttling, and increased API request limits. The exact features and pricing of the ChatGPT Professional plan can vary depending on the specific needs of the user and the agreements made with OpenAI.
The Morning After: Microsoft expands 'multibillion dollar' deal with OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT
Microsoft is making a "multibillion-dollar" investment that will lead to wider uses of OpenAI's technology, as well as more robust behind-the-scenes support. Microsoft has launched OpenAI-powered features, like natural language programming and a DALL-E 2 graphic design tool. OpenAI uses Microsoft's infrastructure to train its best-known systems, including DALL-E 2 and the popular ChatGPT bot. ChatGPT is coming to Azure soon. However, don't expect anyone to see ChatGPT in Bing โ at least not yet.
OpenAI to Receive Multibillion-Dollar Investment From Microsoft - GovCon Wire
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has agreed to make a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI, creator of artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, to support the latter's independent AI research and development efforts and enable both companies to commercialize new AI platforms. "We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research
Companies Tap Tech Behind ChatGPT to Make Customer-Service Chatbots Smarter
ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI in November, quickly went viral for its often elegant, information-packed responses to various questions, gripping the imaginations of regular people, business leaders and investors including Microsoft Corp., which began backing OpenAI in 2019 and said Monday that it would make a multibillion-dollar investment in the startup. OpenAI last week said it would soon add ChatGPT, which stands for chat generative pre-trained transformer, to its application programming interface, or API, which lets developers embed OpenAI technology into their own products. But customer-experience executives said overreliance on such AI models could lead to companies dishing out incorrect information to customers online without knowing they are doing so. While many chatbots are trained to deliver a version of "I don't know" to requests they cannot compute, ChatGPT, for example, is more likely to spout off a response with complete confidence--even if the information is wrong. CMO Today delivers the most important news of the day for media and marketing professionals.
Bill Gates in Australia: Billionaire says AI is coming for white-collar jobs
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has predicted rapid developments in the capability of artificial intelligence programs, such as high-profile tool ChatGPT, will dramatically change the way people source information online, and warned white-collar job losses will inevitably result from its use. Speaking to The Australian Financial Review after an event at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Monday, the technology pioneer said he had been experimenting with generative AI programs a lot over the past year, and saw huge potential benefits for health and education. Bill Gates appeared at a Sydney event on Monday, before discussing new developments in AI. Microsoft is already an investor in OpenAI, the company behind the GPT-3.5 language system that ChatGPT is based on, as well as Dall-E, which generates images from text prompts, and is in discussions to invest as much as $US10 billion ($14.3 It has been suggested that generative AI could blow open the internet search market that has long been dominated by Google, amid reports that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had recently been called back from semi-retirement to hold emergency meetings about how to incorporate chatbots in its search pages.
Microsoft invests $10 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI
Microsoft is investing $10 billion in OpenAI, whose artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT has lit up the internet since its introduction in November, amassing more than a million users within days and touching off a fresh debate over the role of AI in the workplace. The new support, building on $1 billion Microsoft poured into OpenAI in 2019 and another round in 2021, is intended to give Microsoft access to some of the most popular and advanced artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft is competing with Alphabet, Amazon.com. At the same time, OpenAI needs Microsoft's funding and cloud-computing power to crunch massive volumes of data and run the increasingly complex models that allow programs like DALL-E to generate realistic images based on a handful of words, and ChatGPT to create astonishingly human-like conversational text. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.