DAVOS, Switzerland--Microsoft Corp. plans to incorporate artificial-intelligence tools like ChatGPT into all of its products and make them available as platforms for other businesses to build on, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said. Speaking Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal panel at the World Economic Forum's annual event here in the Swiss mountains, Mr. Nadella said that his company will move quickly to commercialize tools from OpenAI, the research lab behind the ChatGPT chatbot as well as image generator Dall-E 2, which turns language prompts into novel images. Microsoft was an early investor in the startup.

Generative artificial intelligence, tech that can invent virtually any content someone can think up and type into a text box, is garnering not just venture investment in Silicon Valley but interest in Davos at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting this week. Defining the category is ChatGPT, a chatbot that the startup called OpenAI released in November. The tech works by learning from vast amounts of data how to answer any prompt by a user in a human-like way, offering information like a search engine would or prose like an aspiring novelist. Executives have floated wide-ranging applications for the nascent technology, from use as a programming assistant to a step forward in the global race for AI and military supremacy. Conference goers with a major stake in the development of the technology include Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), whose chief executive, Satya Nadella, said the tech's progress has not been linear.

Microsoft is giving more people -- or at least more customers -- access to OpenAI's technologies, including ChatGPT. The tech giant has announced that it's now making the Azure OpenAI Service generally available after giving a limited number of enterprise customers access to it when it debuted in November 2021. As Bloomberg notes, customers who have access to the service can use various OpenAI tools for their own cloud applications, including the Dall-E AI art generator and the GPT-3.5 language system. Microsoft says it's also adding access to ChatGPT, which it describes as a "fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5," to the service "soon." ChatGPT is coming soon to the Azure OpenAI Service, which is now generally available, as we help customers apply the world's most advanced AI models to their own business imperatives. The tech giant has been associated with OpenAI ever since it invested $1 billion in the Elon Musk-founded startup back in 2019.

Microsoft Corp. said Monday that it is allowing more customers access to the software behind popular artificial-intelligence tools made by OpenAI. The startup has been the center of the tech industry's recent surge in excitement about AI, thanks to its futuristic products such as chatbot ChatGPT, which can answer questions and write essays and poems, and image generator Dall-E 2, which turns language prompts into novel images.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. Three artists launched the lawsuit through the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and lawyer and designer/programmer Matthew Butterick, who recently teamed up to file a similar lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI, related to the generative AI programming model CoPilot. The artists claim that Stable Diffusion and Midjourney scraped the Internet to copy billions of works without permission, including theirs, which then are used to produce "derivative works." In a blog post, Butterick described Stable Diffusion as a "parasite that, if allowed to proliferate, will cause irreparable harm to artists, now and in the future."

Over the last decade, the landscape of machine learning software development has undergone significant changes. Many frameworks have come and gone, but most have relied heavily on leveraging Nvidia's CUDA and performed best on Nvidia GPUs. However, with the arrival of PyTorch 2.0 and OpenAI's Triton, Nvidia's dominant position in this field, mainly due to its software moat, is being disrupted. This report will touch on topics such as why Google's TensorFlow lost out to PyTorch, why Google hasn't been able to capitalize publicly on its early leadership of AI, the major components of machine learning model training time, the memory capacity/bandwidth/cost wall, model optimization, why other AI hardware companies haven't been able to make a dent in Nvidia's dominance so far, why hardware will start to matter more, how Nvidia's competitive advantage in CUDA is wiped away, and a major win one of Nvidia's competitors has at a large cloud for training silicon. SemiAnalysis is an ad-free, reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The 1,000-foot summary is that the default software stack for machine learning models will no longer be Nvidia's closed-source CUDA. The ball was in Nvidia's court, and they let OpenAI and Meta take control of the software stack. That ecosystem built its own tools because of Nvidia's failure with their proprietary tools, and now Nvidia's moat will be permanently weakened.

The artists taking action -- Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz -- "seek to end this blatant and enormous infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work," according to the official text of the complaint filed to the court. Using tools like Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or the DreamUp generator on DeviantArt, people can type phrases to create artwork similar to living artists. Since the mainstream emergence of AI image synthesis in the last year, AI-generated artwork has been highly controversial among artists, sparking protests and culture wars on social media. Enlarge/ A selection of images generated by Stable Diffusion. Knowledge of how to render them came from scraped images on the web.

This is a weekly newsletter exploring the collision of technology and humanity. What's exciting about AI right now is that the platform layer is solidifying, meaning that it's time for the application layer to emerge. Over the past few months, I've written several Digital Native pieces about what's happening in AI. Given that this is the topic in tech as we head into 2023, I wanted to combine those pieces into one cohesive deep-dive on AI, and then expand upon them. The result is that this is a longer piece than usual, but my hope is that it offers a "state of the union" snapshot for where we are and a hint at where we might be going. When I think about what's happening in artificial intelligence, I tend to think of two movies. One came out 33 years ago, and one came out 10 months ago. Hyperland is a mostly-forgotten 1990 film written by Douglas Adams, an author best known for writing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The premise of Hyperland (which you can watch on YouTube here) is that Adams is fed up by passive linear TV--what the film calls "the sort of television that just happens at you, that you just sit in front of like a couch potato." Seeking a more interactive form of media, Adams takes his TV to a dump, where he meets Tom (played by Tom Baker). Tom is a software agent--essentially, a digital butler capable of personalizing your information and entertainment diet to your specific interests. Tom takes our protagonist through a virtual land of hypermedia--linked text, sounds, images, and videos. In other words, Tom takes Adams on a journey through the internet.

Last spring, an artificial intelligence lab called OpenAI unveiled technology that lets you create digital images simply by describing what you want to see. Called DALL-E, it sparked a wave of similar tools with names like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Promising to speed the work of digital artists, this new breed of AI captured the imagination of both the public and the pundits -- and threatened to generate new levels of online disinformation. Social media is now teeming with the surprisingly conceptual, in which shockingly detailed, often photorealistic images are generated by DALL-E and other tools. "Photo of a teddy bear riding a skateboard in Times Square." "Cute corgi in a house made out of sushi."

When ChatGPT--the ingenious, garrulous, and occasionally unhinged chatbot from OpenAI--was asked this week how much the company behind it is worth, its responses included: "It is likely that its worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more." Microsoft, which is rumored to be weighing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI on top of an earlier $1 billion commitment, is betting that the company is worth a lot more--despite the fact neither ChatGPT nor other AI models made by OpenAI are yet raking in huge amounts of cash. OpenAI has built several impressive and attention-grabbing demos and powers a popular autocomplete function for coders offered by Microsoft's GitHub. But despite the hype swirling around its technology, the startup hasn't created a breakout, highly lucrative product or business. Cham compares the current situation to the early days of the Internet, when some obscure but evocative demos turned out to precede a sea change in the workings of software, tech companies, and wider society.