Big tech and the pursuit of AI dominance
What has actually been achieved on this video call? It takes Jared Spataro just a few clicks to find out. Microsoft’s head of productivity software pulls up a sidebar in Teams, a video-conferencing service. There is a 30-second pause while somewhere in one of the firm’s vast data centres an artificial-intelligence (AI) model analyses a recording of the virtual meeting so far. Then an impressively accurate summary of your correspondent’s questions and Mr Spataro’s answers appears. Mr Spataro can barely contain his enthusiasm. “This is not your daddy’s AI,” he beams.
Teams is not the only product into which Microsoft is implanting machine intelligence. On March 16th the software giant announced that almost all its productivity software, including Word and Excel, were getting the same treatment. Two days earlier, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced a similar upgrade for its productivity products, such as Gmail and Sheets.
The announcements add to a spate of similar ones in the past month or so from America’s tech titans. OpenAI, the startup which is part-owned by Microsoft and which created ChatGPT, an AI conversationalist that has taken the world by storm, released GPT-4, a new super-powerful AI model. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud-computing arm, said it will expand its partnership with Hugging Face, another AI startup. Apple is reportedly testing the use of new AI models across its business, including with Siri, its virtual assistant. Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta, said he wants to “turbocharge” Meta’s products with AI. Adding to its productivity tools, on March 21st Google launched its own AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT, called Bard.
2023-03-26 12:34:56
Source from www.economist.com