Microsoft is in talks to invest $10 billion in US artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, which has developed some of the most popular artificial intelligence tools, including the chatbot known as ChatGPT, according to Reuters.
Since its availability for public use in November 2022, ChatGPT has managed to capture the attention of millions of users around the world with its unique and fast ability to provide answers to questions on various topics, making it a serious competitor of the traditional. search engine.
According to sources from the Semafor news site, OpenAI will get $10 billion in funding from Microsoft in exchange for getting 75% of the AI company's profits until Microsoft recoups the full amount. , before Microsoft controlled 49% of the artificial intelligence company's value.
Although Microsoft has refrained from commenting on the matter so far, most reports predict that the company plans to release a new version of the Bing search engine equipped with a chatbot, which could increase its popularity and threaten the Google's search engine position, which controls about 92.58% of the population % of the Internet search engine market.
But what is ChatGPT?
On November 30, the American company OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and in just five days it managed to get more than one million users.
ChatGPT analyzes and ingests a large number of linguistic texts to answer users' questions, including writing assignments, poems, short stories and articles in multiple languages.
This success has raised questions about the impact of chatbots on the future of search engines, particularly Google's most widely used engine, especially after the company issued a high-risk alert to its employees in mid- December 2022, inviting them to focus on projects. develop Artificial Intelligence tools to compete with ChatGPT.
While it's hard to rely on ChatGPT and other chatbots for information as accurate as what search engines have provided so far, self-learning bots' ability to learn can pave the way for major changes that may occur in Internet searches in several countries. years.
It's hard to predict the extent of the damage Microsoft's deal to invest in OpenAI would cause, if completed. Google is still developing its own chatbots, such as the BERT language technology it has built into its search to reduce the appearance of explicit content in search results.
The company is also developing the LaMDA tool, which sparked controversy last July after a former company engineer who oversaw its development claimed he had become "emotional and self-aware" based on the text. a conversation with the tool, during which the latter asked that he "be recognized as an employee". In the business, not owned by Google.
However, "Google" denied this information at the time, confirming that its experts had worked with the engineer "for several months" before concluding that "there is no basis to his allegations", As a result, all its services were disabled. .
ChatGPT's developer is OpenAI, which was started as a nonprofit in 2015 by Americans Sam Altman and Elon Musk, but Musk pulled out of the company in 2018 after "disagreements" with the rest of the team.
And last December, CEO Sam Altman spoke of his intention to make money from the success of ChatGPT, after hinting at the significant cost to his company of developing the tool.
According to Reuters, OpenAI aspires to achieve revenues of up to $200 billion in 2023, before crossing the $1 billion mark in 2024.