First of all, congratulations to Michelle Yeoh, for her Oscar victory and proving that style never goes out of fashion. Her film swept the board at the Oscars. Even bigger things will be happening with large language models.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to think about what will happen when Microsoft (possibly announcing this Thursday) rolls out chat extensions and other generative AI tools into its office productivity suite. OpenAI’s GPT-4 is just around the corner (perhaps as early as today) and will, by default, do more than its predecessors.
ChatGPT reached 1 million, then 100 million users in record time. But Microsoft could beat that record exponentially, by allowing its 1.2+ billion (and that was only 2015) users to access GPT-4-like tools. We need to face the fact that this could have dramatic, widespread impacts. Let’s explore what those might be.
Microsoft has already tolled out GPT-3.5 to Teams, its conferencing tool. Teams had 280m users in January this year, although it’s unclear how many of them have signed up for the Premium access that features GPT-3.5. I’ve had four Teams meetings this month, and no one was using it.
Powering up a billion brains
Let’s imagine though that the chat-style interface, powering advanced sentence completion, improved grammar and rephrasing, text summarisation, concept extraction, and image and video generation, is plugged directly into Microsoft’s Office products. Accessible to 1.2bn humans.
How can we possibly begin to imagine what kind of impact that might have?