Microsoft wants to incorporate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Office

The Future. Microsoft — a major investor in OpenAI — plans to use the company’s powerful ChatGPT technology to augment Microsoft Office in various ways. Potential use cases range from making it easier to search for a file to getting ChatGPT to call in sick for you. If Microsoft can harness such a powerful, versatile technology, it could radically change the digital workplace — and Microsoft’s relationship with its competitors.

Clippy 2.0
The Verge explored the many ways ChatGPT could improve Microsoft Office — and the ways that it already has.

• The tech giant has already incorporated “an unknown version” of ChatGPT into Word’s autocomplete feature and uses AI for spell check.
• Microsoft’s working on having ChatGPT improve Outlook’s search feature so that users don’t have to use keywords to find documents.
• It gets a lot weirder than that. Microsoft’s rumored to be training ChatGPT to write people’s emails for them — like asking the program to email your boss that you’ll be out sick.
• Allegedly, the firm’s also planning a ChatGPT functionality for Bing, and adding a DALL-E image generation function to PowerPoint.

There are hurdles to implementing these advances. ChatGPT still writes misinformation all the time, and it’s not clear how you can create a customized ChatGPT AI based on one person’s data without compromising their privacy.

Clash of the titans
Microsoft can do all this because the company bought an exclusive license to GPT-3’s underlying tech in 2020 after sinking $1B into OpenAI in 2019. Meaning the firm has positioned itself to capitalize on all of OpenAI’s offerings.

If (read: when) they do, Google’s grasp on the search engine space could rapidly loosen. Google’s seen as a leading competitor in the commercialization of AI because of its deep pockets and advanced AI research programs like LaMDA and DeepMind — but if Microsoft surges ahead with OpenAI’s tech, Google will have to pick up the pace.