On Monday, Microsoft welcomed ex-OpenAI CEO Sam Altman into its ranks, while Bing released new AI-powered webpage snippets and summaries.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced on X that Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman have joined Microsoft. The two recruits will take charge of the US tech giant’s new advanced artificial intelligence (AI) research team.
OpenAI’s board ousted Altman on a 4-of-6 vote on Friday, taking stakeholders by surprise. Soon after the announcement, investors demanded Altman’s reinstatement, leading to interim CEO Mira Murati inviting Altman for negotiations.
Insiders reported that Altman insisted that he would only return if the four board members who fired him stepped down. Negotiations broke down on Sunday, and OpenAI announced it would not rehire Altman.
Subsequently, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear becomes OpenAI’s new interim CEO, replacing Murati. Shear resigned from Twitch in March to spend more time with his wife and their newborn son.
Investors were delighted at the prospect of Microsoft developing technology on par with the Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT). Following the move, the tech giant closed November 20’s market session 2.05% higher at $377.44 per share.
At the same time, the multinational tech corporation reiterated that it would continue its partnership with the AI research and deployment company. Microsoft invested $13.00 billion in OpenAI, acquiring 75.00% of the AI firm’s profits.
Bing Showcases Microsoft AI Tech with New Features
Bing has silently deployed a new addition named Generative Captions, leveraging GPT-4 tech to present users with new functionality. The search engine uses easy-to-read snippets and personalized summaries to enhance the browsing experience.
Generative Captions analyzes search queries, extracts webpage information, and restructures the information into easily digestible snippets. It also presents AI-generated synopses to make it easy for the user to gauge a web page’s relevance.
The update came shortly after Microsoft was prompted to adjust its Bing Image Creator after a complaint by Disney. Disney protested about people using the image generator to make fake Pixar movie posters based on their pets.
Asking the creator to generate movie poster-style pictures now results in an image with intentionally misspelled words and blurred letters. Hence, the end product no longer looks real, and people are more likely to notice it is AI-generated.
