Daily Digest: Microsoft vs OpenAI

PLUS: Stack Overflow makes a deal.

May 07, 2024

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Hello folks, here’s what we have today;

PICKS

  1. New tutorial: Use AI to create persuasive product descriptions for e-commerce sites.

  2. Microsoft is building a massive LLM called MAI-1 (without OpenAI). It's no secret that Microsoft has leaned heavily on OpenAI's tech to power its AI ambitions. But, things are changing! They're building their own in-house powerhouse AI model, dubbed MAI-1. 🍿Our Summary

  3. Stack Overflow and Open AI are joining hands. Using Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI, Open AI will improve its models for developers. It’s unclear whether this includes training on the massive knowledge base of code and tech answers or just citing answers from the API. 🍿Our Summary

  4. Another leak: OpenAI might postpone a company event supposed to happen this Thursday i.e. 9th May. Oops, gotta wait to find out what search.chatgpt.com is. Also, chat.openai.com now redirects to chatgpt.com (used to be the opposite).

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QUICK BITES

It's no secret that Microsoft has leaned heavily on OpenAI's tech to power its AI ambitions. But, things are changing! They're building their own in-house powerhouse AI model, dubbed MAI-1, to go toe-to-toe with giants like Google and OpenAI itself.

What’s going on here?

Microsoft is building a massive LLM named MAI-1.

What does this mean?

Microsoft has built baby LLMs like Phi (1-3B parameters), but MAI-1 is seriously beefed up. With roughly 500 billion parameters, it'll outmuscle Microsoft's previous efforts. OpenAI has supplied Microsoft with such big models until now (and it still is).

This signals a two-pronged strategy: they're still into smaller, cheaper models for everyday apps, BUT they're also swinging for the fences with state-of-the-art AI. Microsoft isn't content relying solely on OpenAI anymore.

Mustafa Suleyman, ex-Deepmind bigwig and founder of Inflection, leads the charge. Microsoft basically scooped up his team and tech two months ago. It is setting aside Nvidia GPUs just for MAI-1 and even using data from OpenAI's GPT-4 model to train (a big no-no for other companies as per OpenAI’s terms).

Why should I care?

Emails show that Microsoft invested in OpenAI because CTO Kevin Scott and CEO Satya Nadella were legit scared of how good Google’s AI lead was. They were seriously behind. By all means, this investment has played out well.

Could it be that OpenAI was Microsoft’s way to win the catch-up? And now, since they have, Microsoft’s not relying on them 100%. It’s investing in OpenAI’s rivals (Mistral), going after the same enterprise customers, and building models that go toe-to-toe with GPT-4.

Well, we will keep tabs on MAI-1 for y’all, we might see a sneak peek at Microsoft's Build conference this month!

QUICK BITES

Stack Overflow used to do the job of answering fancy developer questions, but now AI is everywhere. Which one to pick then? Open AI and Stack Overflow want you to use both.

What's going on here?

OpenAI is getting access to verified solutions and tech answers straight from Stack Overflow.

What does this mean?

Stack Overflow and Open AI are joining hands. Using Stack Overflow’s Overflow API, Open AI will improve its models for developers. It’s not clear whether this includes training on the massive knowledge base of code and tech answers or just citing answers from the API.

Stack Overflow will use OpenAI’s models to build its Overflow AI feature that does kinda the same job—find relevant stuff from Stack Overflow that can answer your question.

The first set of features from this partnership is expected to come in the first half of 2024 i.e. soon.

Why should I care?

StackOverflow got a massive hit in its traffic due to ChatGPT. Devs graduated to creating the answers to their questions on-demand using AI, instead of searching on the forum.

But since then Stack Overflow has made attempts to bounce back. They launched their Overflow API, gating access to their data—which has also led to deals like this and a similar one with Google Cloud back in Feb 24.

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