Microsoft Enhances AI

Some years ago, sending a letter required the use of a typewriter and the postal service. Then MS Word and Outlook came along and significantly improved the process. Here's another example: to prepare company accounts or analyse financial data required a team of people to record the numbers on paper, and then run manual calculations. Now MS Excel does all of that with one person and a few clicks of a button.

A similar technological jump is underway from harnessing the abilities of artificial intelligence (AI). I wrote last year about ChatGPT, an app that was taking the internet by storm. At the time, most people were using it as a gimmick, asking it silly questions and seeing the reply. Since then, it has been used for far more practical things. Here is a broad list of operations that can be done - 11 Things You Can Do With ChatGPT.

One of the most significant tasks is writing code in many languages, debugging code, translating code from one programming language to another, writing scripts from scratch and creating websites. These are tasks that would take a programmer hours to do, and then there would probably be bugs that needed to be found and rectified. With ChatGPT, these tasks are completed flawlessly in under a minute.

Microsoft already owns a small stake of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. It is now investing a further $10 billion to raise its stake to 49% and to deploy AI in its own products. The plan will be to improve their search engine Bing, to make it more competitive with Google. AI is the future of search. Google has spent billions developing their own AI, but we will have to see if it is as effective as ChatGPT.

The second area which Microsoft plans to use this AI technology is with MS Office. Imagine the AI bot writing a whole essay for you on Nelson Mandela, in less than a minute. How about the bot creating and maintaining complex excel spreadsheets. Or something more basic, like replying to emails.

Massive change is on the way. We live in exciting times.