Microsoft and OpenAI share a special partnership with the Windows maker having made an investment of around $10 billion in the latter. The unique partnership has allowed OpenAI to work with some companies that are known nemesis of Microsoft like Salesforce and DuckDuckGo.
However, a new report by the Wall Street Journal claims that tensions might be building between the two companies. It claims that OpenAI had warned Microsoft about the potential dangers of using the unreleased version of GPT-4 for powering its Bing Chatbot.
Notably, Microsoft had said during the launch of Bing Chat that its chatbot was powered by a proprietary language model called Prometheus. However, in March, Microsoft officially confirmed that it's AI chatbot was indeed powered by the OpenAI's GPT-4 language model.
The WSJ report claims some Microsoft employees were also worried about using OpenAI's language model arguing that it could steal the Bing's thunder. While other employees believed that Bing could learn from the way the public used ChatGPT.
Anyhow, Microsoft went ahead with launching the New Bing Chat despite warnings by OpenAI which led the chatbot to have many issues leading to the Seattle-based company ultimately restricting the number of conversations users could have with its chatbot.
“Microsoft went ahead with the release of the Bing chatbot. The warnings proved accurate. Users encountered incorrect answers and concerning interactions with the tool,” WSJ reported.
While OpenAI and Microsoft have seemed united in a bid to defeat Google in the generative AI-based chatbot race, the report indicates that cracks might be finally starting to appear behind the scenes between the two companies.
Furthermore, given that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat cater to the same audience more or less, it is bound to create problems between the two companies. The WSJ report states “Microsoft has effectively limited the potential search-engine customers for OpenAI.”
“Microsoft and OpenAI sales teams sometimes pitch the same customers.” the report added.
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