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This week, Microsoft confirmed that it plans to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind the viral new chatbot tool ChatGPT.
The prospect of Microsoft, the maker of software that people mostly hate, getting involved with ChatGPT, a product people generally like, raises many eyebrows.
Soon, people started joking on social media that they could use ChatGPT to bring back the widely infamous big-eyed rogue known as Clippy.
In case anyone forgot, Clippy was Microsoft’s silly little virtual assistant that popped up to help you format your English Lit essays. Clippy was as cute as a cartoon dog and intelligent to match.
Perhaps the truly impressive tech behind ChatGPT can do what Clippy couldn’t, offer real help and more.
My colleague Samantha Murphy Kelly spoke to an AI expert about the prospects of a partnership between Microsoft and ChatGPT.
ABI Research Artificial Intelligence Analyst David Lobina told Sam: “ChatGPT is a pretty sophisticated autocomplete tool, and in that sense it’s a much better version than Clippy.”
Ichimi: Since November, ChatGPT has been open to journalists, academics, teachers, publishers, entertainers, and anyone who creates or provides information via email, or almost anyone whose work revolves around creating or evaluating content. It inspires and terrifies people at the same time.
This bot will do whatever your heart desires: songs, poems, essays, news stories, 1920s McCurker-style news stories, Virginia Woolf stream-of-consciousness-style news stories. It can write your silly emails for you. Your wedding vows. Cover letter for your job application.
The power of its AI is, of course, an interesting proposition for Microsoft, makers of some of the world’s most despised yet ubiquitous software such as Outlook, Word, and Excel.
Per Sam:
Possible use cases include creating lines of text for PowerPoint presentations, drafting essays in Word, and automatic data entry in Excel spreadsheets. For Microsoft’s search engine Bing, ChatGPT can provide more personalized search results and better summarize web pages.
All of the above suggestions were generated by asking ChatGPT questions of various formats.
Oh Samantha, you are a fraud!
Anyway, Microsoft has not publicly provided any clues about its plans other than to say it will integrate ChatGPT functionality into its own cloud computing service.
Without details, what’s interesting is that Microsoft, Silicon Valley’s equivalent of a baby boomer, suddenly seems to be at the forefront of the Big Tech AI race.Google reportedly caught off guard and made a fuss over his OpenAI partnership with Microsoft some frustration For the head of AI at Meta.
Of course, AI technology is still young, unreliable, and fraught with ethical challenges.
“Systems like ChatGPT can be unreliable and are ongoing hoaxes, giving different answers to the same question, not to mention sexist and racist prejudices,” said Lobina. say.
This increases the chances that the anthropomorphic paper clip helper can really help you, but it can be as problematic and prejudiced as the internet that its brain is built on. I have.
Amazon, for better or worse, is deeply ingrained in our personal lives.
The company has been responsive to the constant demand for dog toys, moisturizers, running socks, and even the semi-annual urge to rewatch every episode of Fleabag in one sitting, keeping the latest makes it even more personal with our products.
See it here: Amazon is a $5/month subscription service that offers 60 common generic prescription drugs for dozens of common conditions, including high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, and hair loss. It was started.
This week, a new delivery service, RxPass, launched in most parts of the US (a few states, including California and Texas, have been excluded due to their own requirements for shipping prescriptions).
For those taking multiple medications, this could be a game changer. . This is $5 total, not $5 on top of the cost of the medication. A flat rate regardless of the number of prescriptions.
catch? RxPass is an add-on to your Amazon Prime membership for $139/year. So if you haven’t taken the prime train yet, it might look steep. Also, people with government health insurance such as Medicare or Medicaid are not eligible.
Over the years, Amazon has made steady inroads into healthcare, with a few setbacks (we’re talking about Amazon Care). It will launch an online pharmacy in 2020 and is in the process of acquiring One Medical, a small primary care provider.
The bottom line: As far as Amazon is concerned, the program is almost certainly loss-making, analysts say. But for companies that value the fact that consumers rely on them, it’s smart. When RxPass works and makes you put dog food and antidepressants in the same box every month, it’s true both literally and figuratively.
My colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn has many more.
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