Windows Copilot Newsletter #18 - Microsoft AI; Apple ponders Gemini; can chatbots plan?
Windows Copilot Newsletter #18
Microsoft AI launches; Apple negotiates for use of Google Gemini; and what we don't know about chatbots - is a lot...
G'day and welcome to the eighteenth edition of the Windows Copilot Newsletter, where we curate all of the most important stories in the rapidly-evolving field of AI chatbots. Another huge week, so we'll dive right in...
Top Stories
Microsoft poaches Inflection for Microsoft AI: In a shock announcement - the biggest news story this quarter in the field of AI chatbots - Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella blogged about a new division of Microsoft - "Microsoft AI" - headed up by a brand-new employee, Mustafa Suleyman. A co-founder of AI research firm DeepMind (purchased by Google in 2015), Suleyman was until this week co-founder and CEO of his own AI startup, Inflection. Inflection is still going - despite having lost Chief Scientist Karén Simonyan as well as Suleyman, installing Sean White as CEO. (Yes, that's as weird as it sounds, so read Paul Smith from the Australian Financial Review as he picks that story apart.) All of this is in service of "Microsoft AI", a division "focused on advancing Copilot and our other consumer AI products and research."
Apple looks to Google for Gemini: Although Apple has produced a steady stream of solid research papers on the technologies of AI chatbots, their own chatbot seems to be progressing more slowly than they'd envisioned. As with the iPhone nearly two decades ago, Apple is looking to Google to fill in their gaps, reportedly in discussions to license Google's Gemini AI chatbot for 'off device' uses. Or maybe they'll use OpenAI's ChatGPT? Apple always plays its cards close to its chest - perhaps all of these rumours are true, or none of them are. Read all about it.
Copilot, everywhere, part 123: The latest incursion of Microsoft's 'Copilot all the things' strategy involves the file context menu - which appears when you right-click on a file icon. Soon we'll see "Send to Copilot" and "Summarise" options - both of which will send the contents of the selected file off to Microsoft for analysis. That sounds...potentially dangerous. Read it all here.
Google flaunts its domain: This week, Google redirected a domain it owns - ai.com - to point to its Gemini chatbot, underscoring just how serious Google's ambitions are in the AI chatbot space.
Top Tips
Microsoft gives away GPT-4 Turbo for free: Although OpenAI will make you pay a US $20/month subscription to access their best-of-breed GPT-4 Turbo model, any Copilot user can access the very same model at no cost. Read how to do that here.
7 Best Uses of Copilot: A great listicle.
Safely and Wisely
Attackers can spy on encrypted chatbot conversations: A recent vulnerability details how a 'side channel' attack can be used to work out what a chatbot says, even when the conversation is encrypted. Not long after the attack was made public by researchers, CloudFlare reported they had developed a mitigation. So is this still a problem? Without that mitigation, absolutely.
ChatGPT fails as a reporter's aide: Although seemingly well-suited to help a reporter gather and organise the facts of an article, this story shows why AI chatbots may not be well suited to that particular task.
Longreads
Can an AI Make Plans? This great article from The New Yorker looks at all the things we don't know about how AI chatbots operate - and how that's holding back the field.
The View from 2064: ABC News' long exploration of the forty-years-from-now future. Are we still human? Do we still have bodies? And what about 'the Singularity'?
Understanding the Microsoft Copilot Pro Value Proposition
Last month, Drew Smith and I released our first Wisely AI white paper - designed to help organisations evaluate whether the features in Copilot Pro justify handing Microsoft a hefty AUD $45 per month per person subscription fee. Read or download the white paper here.
Our next white paper, 'De-Risking AI', will be coming out in April. To receive a copy upon release, sign up here.
More next week - when we’ll be back with more AI chatbot news!
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