Few companies have experienced the ups and downs of Microsoft, which is almost 50 years old. It helped start the PC revolution in the 1970s and became a colossus of the tech world in the 1980s and 1990s, essentially setting the agenda for the tech world. Then, after a federal antitrust lawsuit and lack of leadership from CEO Steve Ballmer, the company slumped, losing its technological luster in a "lost decade" beginning in 2000.
When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Ballmer in 2014, Microsoft began a slow and steady climb, betting on the cloud instead of Windows. But his comeback was not based on beating his competitors with innovative new technologies. Instead, Microsoft has gained ground by leveraging technologies that already exist, such as the cloud, Office, and Windows. No one turned to exciting technology there; no one expected him to set the technological agenda.
And certainly no one looked to Microsoft to find out how we might live and work in the future, until the ChatGPT chatbot and its integration with Bing took the world by storm. In just a few months, Microsoft has gone from being an exciting utility company to setting the technology agenda and becoming the undisputed leader in artificial intelligence (AI).
Say goodbye, Cortana, you're dumb as a rock.
Although it seemed to happen with lightning speed, the moment was years in the making. It all started when Microsoft got rid of one of its most embarrassing flops, Cortana, the digital assistant it launched in 2014 to compete with Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.
Cortana never took off. In late 2018, I documented how the digital assistant had become an abject failure. I pointed out at the time that while Amazon had sold 50 million Alexa-powered smart speakers, sales of the only smart speaker with Cortana built-in were too small to measure.
I also noticed something I didn't even recognize the importance of at the time: Cortana was moved from the Research and AI division to the User Experiences team. The Cortana team was gutted, with the departure of Javier Soltero from Microsoft, Cortana's vice president, at the end of the year. It just seemed like a sign to me that Microsoft knew Cortana had no future as a standalone assistant.
This was not the case. In 2020, Microsoft basically killed it.
But the move involved much more than that. It represented Nadella's recognition that the future of AI did not lie with intelligent assistants like Cortana, Siri and Alexa. Instead, she saw that the future of AI, and perhaps the future of computing, would lie in generative AI like what is now ChatGPT. Which is why, just over six months after removing Cortana from its AI division, Microsoft invested a billion dollars in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Recently, it announced a follow-up investment of €10 billion.
Nadella recently criticized Cortana and her entire cohort of digital assistants, saying that "they were all dumb as rocks. Whether it's Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri, they all just don't work. No. We had a product that was supposed to being the new front-end for a lot of hasn't worked."
Why chatbots are the best digital assistants
Understanding the difference between how digital assistants and generative AI chatbots are developed (and how they work) goes a long way to understanding why Nadella sees digital assistants as the past and ChatGPT as the future.
You can find a deep dive into their differences in The New York Times. But here's the quick version: digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are command and control systems. They can only understand and act on specific questions and requests, such as "What movies are playing near me?" or "How will the weather be in Rome tomorrow?"
This makes them much more limited than chatbots like ChatGPT, which can perform an incredible variety of tasks, from writing marketing copy, summarizing articles, creating graphics, writing code, and much more. . And even more is to come. At Microsoft's "Future of Work" event, the company discussed the AI-powered Microsoft 365 co-pilot, which can create Office documents on its own; for example, building a PowerPoint presentation based entirely on a Word document, applying styles and animations throughout the presentation. Microsoft says you can even write a business proposal based solely on meeting notes.
Digital assistants are not only very underpowered compared to chatbots, but coding them to perform new tasks can be even more challenging. Former Apple engineer John Burkey, who worked to improve Siri, told The Times that even a simple change, such as adding new phrases to Siri's data set, can take up to six weeks, as it requires rebuilding the entire database. underlying data. Adding more complex features, like a new search tool, can take almost a year.
Compare that to the incredible speed with which new features are added to chatbots like ChatGPT on what sometimes seems like a daily basis. This is because chatbots are based on large language model technology.
And that's why Microsoft is suddenly the technology leader. Saying goodbye to Cortana and focusing on AI chatbots worked. That doesn't mean the race is over. Competitors, especially Google, have been devoting considerable resources to AI for years. Google recently publicly launched its Bard chatbot. Others will follow.
Of course, the AI might not turn out to be as transformative as expected. It is still early. Even the latest version, Chatbot GPT 4, is plagued with major issues. Like his predecessors, he is prone to what researchers call "hallucinations", what in the real world we call "harassment", making things up when he doesn't know the answers.
But for now at least, Microsoft finds itself in an unusual situation: being the talk of the tech world, and in a good way.
Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.