AI is the new Word

Deliveroo seems to base its playbook on the final scene of ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’

Microsoft has always been more of a big beast than a sexy beast. An often clunky operating system and a ubiquitous set of office products may not be the most exciting offering in the tech universe, but the company has proved astonishingly effective at pulling in the cash over the years.

It’s like the Elon Musk vs Bill Gates debate — it’s pretty clear which of the two you’d entrust with your life, just as it wouldn’t take long to decide which you’d take for a lost weekend in Vegas.

But Microsoft’s three-year partnership with OpenAI looks set to get its snout way ahead of its rivals in the charge to commercialise AI technology. OpenAI has released a new version of its game-changing chatbot GPT-4, which Microsoft has already integrated into its Bing search engine.

Now it has demonstrated an AI “Copilot” for its Office software, which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said would “unlock a new wave of productivity growth with powerful Copilots designed to remove the drudgery from our daily tasks and jobs”.

Clearly, a function that can instantly hash out a document or knock up a decent spreadsheet, given a few parameters, will be enormously useful — and deeply threatening to all the worker drones who do such things the old-fashioned way.

ChatGPT picked up 100-million users within three months of its launch in November, and its rapturous reception was in stark contrast to the reaction to Baidu’s launch last Thursday of its Chinese-language equivalent, Ernie.

The launch impressed the market so little that Baidu’s share price promptly fell by 10%.