When ChatGPT—chatbot skillful, talkative and sometimes heartless openAI—asked this week how much the company behind it is worth, its answers included: “It is likely to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.”
Microsoft, that is Rumored to be considering a $10 billion investment in OpenAI on top of its previous $1 billion commitment, is betting that the company is worth a lot more — despite the fact that neither ChatGPT nor the other AI models created by OpenAI have yet raised huge amounts of cash. OpenAI has built some impressive and attention-grabbing demos, while powering a popular application. autofill function for programmer provided by Microsoft’s GitHub. But despite the hype surrounding its technology, the startup failed to create a disruptive, highly lucrative business or product.
James Cham, a partner at Bloomberg Beta, an investment company. But while the bot’s path to riches may not be obvious, Cham shares the feeling of many venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that the technology behind bots will yield huge returns. OpenAI’s technology is at the center of interest in the so-called artificial intelligencea term that includes algorithms that can generate text, images, or other data.
Cham compares the current situation to the early days of the Internet, when some obscure but evocative demos preceded a major shift in the behavior of software, technology companies and society. broader. “We have decades of great AI demonstrations, but this is the first time you give it to someone and they get really excited about the possibilities,” Cham said of ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s chatbot took the internet by storm when it was Released in December 2022. It is powered by GPT-3, a text generation algorithm Developed by OpenAIwas given a large amount of text gathered from the web and other sources, and then received additional training in how to answer the questions.
Some developers were so inspired by ChatGPT that they quickly used it to create apps, such as a spreadsheet assistant capable of performing complex calculations to satisfy a simple input request.
But because of the way ChatGPT works—by finding statistical patterns in the text rather than connecting words with meanings—it also often fabricating facts and figures, misinterprets the question and exhibits biases found in its training data. This can further complicate efforts to use technology broadly, for example by mixing false or misleading information into search results.
One reason the tech industry is excited around ChatGPT, fueled by its living room tricks, is the suggestion that it could break the long-standing dominance of Google and other tech giants, by allowing small companies to outpace much larger competitors. A popular theory is that bots can web search conversion.
For Microsoft, investing more in OpenAI could provide a way to ensure that if there ever comes a time when AI is disruptive, the company will not only be unscathed, but positioned to benefit. Nathan BenaichAn Air Street Capital investor who tracks trends in AI, says that despite a lot of hype around general AI, there are ways Microsoft can use the technology to improve my product.
The company’s broad and diverse product range, from enterprise and cloud services to consumer devices and software, offers a wide range of potential opportunities. Microsoft used the technology behind ChatGPT to automatically generate code snippets in its Visual Studio product, and that’s it. report consider using ChatGPT to improve the performance of the sluggish Bing search engine.
“The surface—the application space that Microsoft has with all of its customers—is vast,” says Benaich. For Microsoft, a company worth about $1.7 trillion, he said, $10 billion isn’t a huge amount considering potential payoffs. Semafor reports that the investment will give OpenAI a $29 billion valuation.
