Microsoft is reportedly considering a $10 billion investment in San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT.
The artificial intelligence-based chatbot became available to the public in November and quickly garnered both praise and criticism for its ability to churn out reams of human-sounding text based on a few simple prompts.
The chatbot is so convincing that schools across the United States are banning it from classrooms to prevent students from using it to cheat on assignments, and venture capital firms are looking into ways to use the tech in their daily operations.
Microsoft is apparently a fan of the technology. The company invested $1 billion worth of cash and cloud credits into OpenAI in 2019, and now it could be looking to increase its stake. So what is it exactly, and why is one of the biggest tech companies in the world interested?
ChatGPT uses what's called a "large language model" to read and translate text from a database and then predict future words in a sequence. This is similar to how Google Docs is able to predict the end of a sentence that you're writing, but ChatGPT is writing the entire sentence. The end result is something that sounds a lot like intelligent speech, but it's actually just a series of probabilities rapidly generated and then spit out for your reading pleasure (or displeasure).
While ChatGPT can approximate human speech, oftentimes the actual content doesn't make sense. Just scan social media for examples of how silly ChatGPT's output can be. As one critic recently argued in The Atlantic, it currently functions more as a toy than a tool.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also recognized that the technology has serious limits.
"ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness," he tweeted in December. "It's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now."
That said, Altman is banking on continual improvements, which could explain why Microsoft is interested.
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Skype users are scrambling to find an alternative after Microsoft shut down the pioneering internet phone service which let people make cheap long distance calls and chat with other users. Google Voice lets users make calls from a smartphone or a desktop web browser but it's only available to people in the U.S. Viber users can call phone numbers but can't get a number to receive calls. Zoom offers phone options too. You could get a number from a low cost virtual carrier or try other internet phone services. Microsoft says some Skype features will migrate to Teams, but its Teams Phone feature is only for businesses.
Amid a backdrop of ongoing tariff uncertainty, more and more gamers are facing price hikes. Microsoft raised recommended retailer pricing for its Xbox consoles and controllers around the world this week. Its Xbox Series S, for example, now starts at $379.99 in the U.S. — up $80 from the $299.99 price tag that debuted in 2020. And its more powerful Xbox Series X will be $599.99 going forward, a $100 jump from its previous $499.99 listing. The tech giant didn’t mention tariffs specifically, but cited wider “market conditions and the rising cost of development.” Beyond the U.S., Microsoft also laid out Xbox price adjustments for Europe, the U.K. and Australia. The company said all other countries would also receive updates locally.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said Thursday that the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. in the current fiscal quarter will be sourced from India, while iPads and other devices will come from Vietnam as the company works to avoid the impact of President Trump’s tariffs on its business. Apple’s earnings for the first three months of the year topped Wall Street’s expectations thanks to high demand for its iPhones, and the company said tariffs had a limited effect on the fiscal second quarter’s results. Cook added that for the current quarter, assuming things don’t change, Apple expects to see $900 million added to its costs as a result of the tariffs.
