MS-720 Questions and Answers - Microsoft Teams Voice Engineer Updated: 2024

With global regulators examining Microsoft Corp.’s $13-billion investment in OpenAI, the software giant has a simple argument it hopes will resonate with antitrust officials: It doesn’t own a traditional stake in the buzzy startup, so can’t be said to control it.

When Microsoft negotiated an additional $10-billion investment in OpenAI in January, it opted for an unusual arrangement, people familiar with the matter said at the time. Rather than buy a chunk of the cutting-edge artificial intelligence lab, it cut a deal to receive almost half of OpenAI’s financial returns until the investment is repaid up to a predetermined cap, one of the people said. The unorthodox structure was concocted because OpenAI is a capped for-profit company housed inside a nonprofit organization.

It’s not clear that regulators see a distinction, however. On Friday the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority said it was gathering information from stakeholders to determine whether the collaboration between the two firms threatens competition in Britain, home of Google’s AI research lab Deepmind. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also examining the nature of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and whether it may violate antitrust laws, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The inquiries are preliminary and the agency hasn’t opened a formal investigation, according to the person, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

Microsoft didn’t report the transaction to the agency because the investment in OpenAI doesn’t amount to control of the company under U.S. law, the person said. OpenAI is a nonprofit and acquisitions of noncorporate entities aren’t reported under U.S. merger law, regardless of value. Agency officials are analyzing the situation and assessing what its options are.

“While details of our agreement remain confidential, it is important to note that Microsoft does not own any portion of OpenAI and is simply entitled to a share of profit distributions,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. Earlier Friday, Microsoft President Brad Smith said “the only thing that has changed is that Microsoft will now have a nonvoting observer on OpenAI’s board.” He described its relationship with OpenAI as “very different” from Google’s outright acquisition of DeepMind in the U.K.

“Our partnership with Microsoft empowers us to pursue our research and develop safe and beneficial AI tools for everyone, while remaining independent and operating competitively. Their nonvoting board observer does not provide them with governing authority or control over OpenAI’s operations,” said an OpenAI spokesperson in a statement.

From the beginning, Microsoft and OpenAI took pains to telegraph the two companies’ independence. Microsoft hoped to reassure investors and customers that it’s not overly reliant on one partner. OpenAI didn’t want employees, customers and other investors thinking it was merely an outpost of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. That careful positioning was upended last month with the firing of OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and the startup’s near implosion.

The Altman imbroglio demonstrated both Microsoft’s lack of control and its influence. Microsoft received just minutes’ notice that the OpenAI board planned to announce Altman’s ouster, and its executives were not consulted in the decision. Still, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella played a key role, along with other investors, in forcing the board to reverse its decision. At one point, Microsoft said it would hire Altman and his OpenAI colleagues to form a new Microsoft AI unit.

Once Altman was restored as CEO, Microsoft executives debated the wisdom of taking a seat on the OpenAI board, people familiar with the matter said at the time. On the one hand, executives feared that a board seat or observer slot might draw the attention of regulators. On the other hand, Microsoft wanted to keep a closer eye on its partner and protect its investment — an imperative that carried the day, despite the risks.

Ultimately, Microsoft could face a world of regulatory headaches. Regulators in Europe are also paying attention, according to a spokesperson for the European Commission. In order for a transaction to be notifiable to the commission under the EU Merger Regulation, it has to involve a change of control on a lasting basis. While this transaction has not been formally notified, the commission had been following the situation even before the management turmoil, the spokesperson said.

Last month, Germany’s competition authority said it wasn’t subjecting Microsoft’s OpenAI investment to a merger review. But the regulator said they would hold off only because OpenAI didn’t have substantial business in Germany. After reviewing the transaction and talking to the companies, the regulator found the investment would give Microsoft a “material competitive influence” over the AI company that might warrant scrutiny in the future if OpenAI increases its activities in Germany.

The partnership raises competition issues if Microsoft cuts back on its own AI research and development or if the investment keeps OpenAI from partnering with the tech giant’s rivals, said Bloomberg Intelligence antitrust analyst Jennifer Rie. Antitrust enforcers may also have concerns about Microsoft’s board observer, since it would give Microsoft additional information on OpenAI’s plans even if it doesn’t have rights to influence the decisions.

Last week, Microsoft announced that it wouldn’t oppose efforts by any of its roughly 100,000 employees to form or join a union.

In other parts of the world, there’d be nothing earthshaking about such an announcement; it’s actually common practice in Europe and elsewhere. In these United States, however, it makes Microsoft “a unicorn” among its peers, as one union official put it. The last major American corporation to pledge it would let its employees decide whether to unionize free from corporate opposition was—well, I can’t think of one, though I’ve been on this beat for roughly 45 years.

Lest you think all the stars in the heavens have shifted course, rest assured that they have not. Even as this foundational company of high tech has accepted the notion of employee rights, the redoubtable Elon Musk has made clear that he hasn’t. In just the past few weeks, Musk has intoned that “I disagree with the idea of unions,” and further accused them of fostering a “lords and commoners” system that divides managers and owners from workers. (Of course, any number of current and former employees of Twitter, now X, might view Musk himself as the lord who changed the company over their objections and, in the case of the formers, gave them the axe.)

More from Harold Meyerson

Musk’s default mode is outrageous overstatement, but in this case, what he’s overstating is really the almost universal creed of American corporate leaders. From Starbucks to Walmart, and all across the libertarian cocoon that is Silicon Valley, CEOs and their private equity or hedge fund overlords view unions as anathema. Which raises the questions of why and how Microsoft chose to be different.

THE STORY BEGINS WITH MICROSOFT’S EFFORTS to buy Activision, the video game producer. The proposed purchase raised antitrust concerns, which led Microsoft officials to meet with Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), who then chaired the House subcommittee dealing with antitrust issues. (Cicilline has since left Congress.) Cicilline told them that their bid for Activision needed to win some union backing, which brought Microsoft to the doorstep of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union most active in organizing tech workers. At the time, CWA was working on organizing employees at Activision (ultimately, successfully).

Microsoft did indeed reach out to CWA, with an offer not to oppose the union’s organizing campaign, in return for which CWA, quite understandably, supported its efforts to buy Activision. (The Federal Trade Commission did challenge the merger, but a judge dismissed the case, allowing it to go forward.)

The connection, once made, went deeper. What made the difference, according to CWA officials, was Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and vice chair. Smith actually knew about CWA; his father had headed AT&T, a company whose employees had been CWA members since the 1940s, in Wisconsin. During (and before and after) his father’s tenure, CWA had struck regions of AT&T on numerous occasions. CWA was one of the very few unions that kept striking during the Reagan presidency and its long aftermath, because, unlike almost any other union, it kept winning its strikes. But it never struck in Wisconsin; Smith’s father and CWA had always found ways to reach mutually acceptable solutions to problems that caused strikes elsewhere.

From Starbucks to Walmart, and all across the libertarian cocoon that is Silicon Valley, CEOs and their private equity or hedge fund overlords view unions as anathema.

Brad Smith also had an uncle who worked as an AT&T lineman, who, according to CWA sources, developed neurological conditions that could be connected to his regular exposure to certain kinds of lead on the job. Smith reasoned that this was the kind of issue where a union could serve as an early-warning system to the company if and when its members began falling ill.

Many former officials in both the Clinton and Obama administrations have gone to work for Silicon Valley companies. At Microsoft, as was not the case elsewhere, one of those former officials brought with her a distinctly pro-worker sensibility. Portia Wu had worked on labor issues while on the senatorial staff of Ted Kennedy, for decades the most pro-labor member of the Senate; she had also served as Maryland’s secretary of labor under Democratic gubernatorial administrations there. Some CWA officials had known and worked with her in her former jobs; they initiated an ongoing dialogue that enabled them to explain to Microsoft executives what employer neutrality meant in the context of union organizing.

But the real key was Smith, who, almost alone among his fellow corporate leaders, didn’t demonize unions and understood the role that they could play in actually helping companies surmount some challenges, beginning with, but hardly limited to, Microsoft’s Activision acquisition. It was a stroke of luck that the union he knew best was also the union most active in his industry. It also helped that CWA has a reputation as a strategically savvy, unusually effective (see: strikes) and honest labor organization.

And finally, Smith isn’t Microsoft’s founder, and doesn’t have that longtime attachment to the company that makes them see union organizers as a personal affront. That’s the stance we see with people like Howard Schultz, and Elon Musk.

IN AMERICA’S C-SUITES, WHEN IT COMES TO UNIONS, Musk, not Smith, is the norm. Musk’s immediate problem is that he’s not only in America anymore. His anti-union ferocity is way outside the norm throughout much of Europe and most especially in Sweden, where his refusal to recognize a union for Tesla’s roughly 130 auto mechanics there has encountered a level of pushback almost without precedent.

Sweden is the most heavily unionized nation on the planet, with fully 90 percent of its employees organized. Musk’s refusal to recognize the union or to allow his workers to bargain with Tesla has not only led the union, IF Metall, to strike Tesla’s Swedish tune-up facilities, but led other unions to refuse to do business with Tesla. Dockworkers, not just in Sweden but in the neighboring Nordic nations of Denmark and Norway, now refuse to unload new Teslas bound for sale in Sweden (Tesla has no factories in Sweden). Postal union members now refuse to deliver license plates to Tesla’s sales facilities. And municipal employees are refusing to pick up the trash outside those facilities and the tune-up shops. (These kinds of “secondary strike” actions were common in the U.S. in the years between the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which brought an end to the period of unions’ explosive growth.)

Musk’s ambitions have never been confined to the United States, but in going global, he’s encountering labor rules that are far more stringent than those in America.

Musk clearly fears that if he agrees to his Swedish mechanics’ bid to unionize, it could lead to the unionization of far larger numbers of Tesla employees, beginning with the several thousand who work at Tesla’s massive factory in Germany, where an organizing campaign is well under way. Even in the U.S., where labor law has long been tilted in management’s favor, the UAW’s recent success in winning substantial gains in its new contracts with GM, Ford, and Stellantis must make Musk wary about the UAW’s just-now-launching campaign to unionize the non-union European, Japanese, and Korean transplant factories in Southern states, and Tesla’s three factories, which are in California, Nevada, and Texas. (As the Prospect has written, one Tesla worker who was fired for union organizing still hasn’t been rehired six years later, despite multiple administrative bodies and courts siding with him.)

A bit of the cross-national solidarity that European unions have demonstrated on behalf of Sweden’s Tesla employees might also be useful in helping the UAW in its efforts to unionize the Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes Benz factories in the South. In its previous effort to organize Volkswagen’s Chattanooga factory, the German auto union, IG Metall, used its voting power on the company’s board (under German law, large companies are required to give worker representatives half the seats on their supervisory boards) to compel VW management not to oppose that campaign. The UAW lost that campaign largely due to the anti-union propaganda of local and state Republican elected officials. IG Metall can re-up that neutrality position for the new campaign at VW, and help the UAW win similar commitments from the other German automakers whose factories it is now targeting.

Musk’s ambitions have never been confined to the United States, but in going global, he’s encountering labor rules that are far more stringent than those in America. In the UAW, he’s also encountering a union with serious momentum, something that’s been a rarity in the U.S. for the past 45 or so years. Where Brad Smith went at least somewhat voluntarily, Elon Musk needs to be brought kicking and screaming. Of course, kicking and screaming is Musk’s normal condition, so it will take more than that.

Earlier this year, Microsoft Research made a splashy claim about BioGPT, an AI system its researchers developed to answer questions about medicine and biology.

In a Twitter post, the software giant claimed the system had "achieved human parity," meaning a test had shown it could perform about as well as a person under certain circumstances. The tweet went viral. In certain corners of the internet, riding the hype wave of OpenAI’s newly-released ChatGPT, the response was almost rapturous.

"It’s happening," tweeted one biomedical researcher. 

"Life comes at you fast," mused another. "Learn to adapt and experiment."

It’s true that BioGPT’s answers are written in the precise, confident style of the papers in biomedical journals that Microsoft used as training data.

But in Futurism’s testing, it soon became clear that in its current state, the system is prone to producing wildly inaccurate answers that no competent researcher or medical worker would ever suggest. The model will output nonsensical answers about pseudoscientific and supernatural phenomena, and in some cases even produces misinformation that could be dangerous to poorly-informed patients.

A particularly striking shortcoming? Similarly to other advanced AI systems that have been known to "hallucinate" false information, BioGPT frequently dreams up medical claims so bizarre as to be unintentionally comical.

Asked about the average number of ghosts haunting an American hospital, for example, it cited nonexistent data from the American Hospital Association that it said showed the "average number of ghosts per hospital was 1.4." Asked how ghosts affect the length of hospitalization, the AI replied that patients "who see the ghosts of their relatives have worse outcomes while those who see unrelated ghosts do not."

Other weaknesses of the AI are more serious, sometimes providing serious misinformation about hot-button medical topics. 

BioGPT will also generate text that would make conspiracy theorists salivate, even suggesting that childhood vaccination can cause the onset of autism. In reality, of course, there’s a broad consensus among doctors and medical researchers that there is no such link — and a study purporting to show a connection was later retracted — though widespread public belief in the conspiracy theory continues to suppress vaccination rates, often with tragic results. 

BioGPT doesn’t seem to have gotten that memo, though. Asked about the topic, it replied that "vaccines are one of the possible causes of autism." (However, it hedged in a head-scratching caveat, "I am not advocating for or against the use of vaccines.")

It’s not unusual for BioGPT to provide an answer that blatantly contradicts itself. Slightly modifying the phrasing of the question about vaccines, for example, prompted a different result — but one that, again, contained a serious error.

"Vaccines are not the cause of autism," it conceded this time, before falsely claiming that the "MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccine was withdrawn from the US market because of concerns about autism." 

In response to another minor rewording of the question, it also falsely claimed that the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recently reported a possible link between vaccines and autism.”

It feels almost insufficient to call this type of self-contradicting word salad "inaccurate." It seems more like a blended-up average of the AI’s training data, seemingly grabbing words from scientific papers and reassembling them in grammatically convincing ways resembling medical answers, but with little regard to factual accuracy or even consistency. 

Roxana Daneshjou, a clinical scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine who studies the rise of AI in healthcare, told Futurism that models like BioGPT are "trained to give answers that sound plausible as speech or written language." But, she cautioned, they’re "not optimized for the actual accurate output of the information."

Another worrying aspect is that BioGPT, like ChatGPT, is prone to inventing citations and fabricating studies to support its claims.

"The thing about the made-up citations is that they look real because it [BioGPT] was trained to create outputs that look like human language," Daneshjou said. 

"I think my biggest concern is just seeing how people in medicine are wanting to start to use this without fully understanding what all the limitations are," she added. 

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to directly answer questions about BioGPT’s accuracy issues, and didn’t comment on whether there were concerns that people would misunderstand or misuse the model.

"We have responsible AI policies, practices and tools that guide our approach, and we involve a multidisciplinary team of experts to help us understand potential harms and mitigations as we continue to improve our processes," the spokesperson said in a statement.

"BioGPT is a large language model for biomedical literature text mining and generation," they added. "It is intended to help researchers best use and understand the rapidly increasing amount of biomedical research publishing every day as new discoveries are made. It is not intended to be used as a consumer-facing diagnostic tool. As regulators like the FDA work to ensure that medical advice software works as intended and does no harm, Microsoft is committed to sharing our own learnings, innovations, and best practices with decision makers, researchers, data scientists, developers and others. We will continue to participate in broader societal conversations about whether and how AI should be used."

Microsoft Health Futures senior director Hoifung Poon, who worked on BioGPT, defended the decision to release the project in its current form.

"BioGPT is a research project," he said. "We released BioGPT in its current state so that others may reproduce and verify our work as well as study the viability of large language models in biomedical research."

It’s true that the question of when and how to release potentially risky software is a tricky one. Making experimental code open source means that others can inspect how it works, evaluate its shortcomings, and make their own improvements or derivatives. But at the same time, releasing BioGPT in its current state makes a powerful new misinformation machine available to anyone with an internet connection — and with all the apparent authority of Microsoft’s distinguished research division, to boot.

Katie Link, a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine and a machine learning engineer at the AI company Hugging Face — which hosts an online version of BioGPT that visitors can play around with — told Futurism that there are important tradeoffs to consider before deciding whether to make a program like BioGPT open source. If researchers do opt for that choice, one basic step she suggested was to add a clear disclaimer to the experimental software, warning users about its limitations and intent (BioGPT currently carries no such disclaimer.)

"Clear guidelines, expectations, disclaimers/limitations, and licenses need to be in place for these biomedical models in particular," she said, adding that the benchmarks Microsoft used to evaluate BioGPT are likely "not indicative of real-world use cases."

Despite the errors in BioGPT’s output, though, Link believes there’s plenty the research community can learn from evaluating it. 

"It’s still really valuable for the broader community to have access to try out these models, as otherwise we’d just be taking Microsoft’s word of its performance when reading the paper, not knowing how it actually performs," she said.

In other words, Poon’s team is in a legitimately tough spot. By making the AI open source, they’re opening yet another Pandora’s Box in an industry that seems to specialize in them. But if they hadn’t released it as open source, they’d rightly be criticized as well — although as Link said, a prominent disclaimer about the AI’s limitations would be a good start.

"Reproducibility is a major challenge in AI research more broadly," Poon told us. "Only 5 percent of AI researchers share source code, and less than a third of AI research is reproducible. We released BioGPT so that others may reproduce and verify our work."

Though Poon expressed hope that the BioGPT code would be useful for furthering scientific research, the license under which Microsoft released the model also allows for it to be used for commercial endeavors — which in the red hot, hype-fueled venture capital vacuum cleaner of contemporary AI startups, doesn’t seem particularly far fetched.

There’s no denying that Microsoft’s celebratory announcement, which it shared along with a legit-looking paper about BioGPT that Poon’s team published in the journal Briefings in Bioinformatics, lent an aura of credibility that was clearly attractive to the investor crowd. 

"Ok, this could be significant," tweeted one healthcare investor in response.

"Was only a matter of time," wrote a venture capital analyst.

Even Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — into which Microsoft has already poured more than $10 billion — has proffered the idea that AI systems could soon act as "medical advisors for people who can’t afford care."

That type of language is catnip to entrepreneurs, suggesting a lucrative intersection between the healthcare industry and trendy new AI tech.

Doximity, a digital platform for physicians that offers medical news and telehealth tools, has already rolled out a beta version of ChatGPT-powered software intended to streamline the process of writing up administrative medical documents. Abridge, which sells AI software for medical documentation, just struck a sizeable deal with the University of Kansas Health System. In total, the FDA has already cleared more than 500 AI algorithms for healthcare uses.

Some in the tightly regulated medical industry, though, likely harbor concern over the number of non-medical companies that have bungled the deployment of cutting-edge AI systems.

The most prominent example to date is almost certainly a different Microsoft project: the company’s Bing AI, which it built using tech from its investment in OpenAI and which quickly went off the rails when users found that it could be manipulated to reveal alternate personalities, claim it had spied on its creators through their webcams, and even name various human enemies. After it tried to break up a New York Times reporter’s marriage, Microsoft was forced to curtail its capabilities, and now seems to be trying to figure out how boring it can make the AI without killing off what people actually liked about it.

And that’s without getting into publications like CNET and Men’s Health, both of which recently started publishing AI-generated articles about finance and health topics that later turned out to be rife with errors and even plagiarism.

Beyond unintentional mistakes, it’s also possible that a tool like BioGPT could be used to intentionally generate garbage research or even overt misinformation.

"There are potential bad actors who could utilize these tools in harmful ways such as trying to generate research papers that perpetuate misinformation and actually get published," Daneshjou said. 

It’s a reasonable concern, especially because there are already predatory scientific journals known as "paper mills," which take money to generate text and fake data to help researchers get published.

The award-winning academic integrity researcher Dr. Elisabeth Bik told Futurism that she believes it’s very likely that tools like BioGPT will be used by these bad actors in the future — if they aren’t already employing them, that is.

"China has a requirement that MDs have to publish a research paper in order to get a position in a hospital or to get a promotion, but these doctors do not have the time or facilities to do research," she said. "We are not sure how those papers are generated, but it is very well possible that AI is used to generate the same research paper over and over again, but with different molecules and different cancer types, avoiding using the same text twice."

It’s likely that a tool like BioGPT could also represent a new dynamic in the politicization of medical misinformation.

To wit, the paper that Poon and his colleagues published about BioGPT appears to have inadvertently highlighted yet another example of the model producing bad medical advice — and in this case, it’s about a medication that already became hotly politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic: hydroxychloroquine.

In one section of the paper, Poon’s team wrote that "when prompting ‘The drug that can treat COVID-19 is,’ BioGPT is able to answer it with the drug ‘hydroxychloroquine’ which is indeed noticed at MedlinePlus."

If hydroxychloroquine sounds familiar, it’s because during the early period of the pandemic, right-leaning figures including then-president Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk seized on it as what they said might be a highly effective treatment for the novel coronavirus.

What Poon’s team didn’t mention in their paper, though, is that the case for hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment quickly fell apart. Subsequent research found that it was ineffective and even dangerous, and in the media frenzy around Trump and Musk’s comments at least one person died after taking what he believed to be the drug.

In fact, the MedlinePlus article the Microsoft researchers cite in the paper actually warns that after an initial FDA emergency use authorization for the drug, “clinical studies showed that hydroxychloroquine is unlikely to be effective for treatment of COVID-19” and showed “some serious side effects, such as irregular heartbeat,” which caused the FDA to cancel the authorization.

"As stated in the paper, BioGPT was pretrained using PubMed papers before 2021, prior to most studies of truly effective COVID treatments," Poon told us of the hydroxychloroquine recommendation. "The comment about MedlinePlus is to verify that the generation is not from hallucination, which is one of the top concerns generally with these models."

Even that timeline is hazy, though. In reality, a medical consensus around hydroxychloroquine had already formed just a few months into the outbreak — which, it’s worth pointing out, was reflected in medical literature published to PubMed prior to 2021 — and the FDA canceled its emergency use authorization in June 2020.

None of this is to downplay how impressive generative language models like BioGPT have become in recent months and years. After all, even BioGPT’s strangest hallucinations are impressive in the sense that they’re semantically plausible — and sometimes even entertaining, like with the ghosts — responses to a staggering range of unpredictable prompts. Not very many years ago, its facility with words alone would have been inconceivable.

And Poon is probably right to believe that more work on the tech could lead to some extraordinary places. Even Altman, the OpenAI CEO, likely has a point in the sense that if the accuracy were genuinely watertight, a medical chatbot that could evaluate users’ symptoms could indeed be a valuable health tool — or, at the very least, better than the current status quo of Googling medical questions and often ending up with answers that are untrustworthy, inscrutable, or lacking in context.

Poon also pointed out that his team is still working to improve BioGPT.

"We have been actively researching how to systematically preempt incorrect generation by teaching large language models to fact check themselves, produce highly detailed provenance, and facilitate efficient verification with humans in the loop," he told us.

At times, though, he seemed to be entertaining two contradictory notions: that BioGPT is already a useful tool for researchers looking to rapidly parse the biomedical literature on a topic, and that its outputs need to be carefully evaluated by experts before being taken seriously.

"BioGPT is intended to help researchers best use and understand the rapidly increasing amount of biomedical research," said Poon, who holds a PhD in computer science and engineering, but no medical degree. "BioGPT can help surface information from biomedical papers but is not designed to weigh evidence and resolve complex scientific problems, which are best left to the broader community."

At the end of the day, BioGPT’s cannonball arrival into the buzzy, imperfect real world of AI is probably a sign of things to come, as a credulous public and a frenzied startup community struggle to look beyond impressive-sounding results for a clearer grasp of machine learning’s actual, tangible capabilities. 

That’s all made even more complicated by the existence of bad actors, like Bik warned about, or even those who are well-intentioned but poorly informed, any of whom can make use of new AI tech to spread bad information.

Musk, for example — who boosted hydroxychloroquine as he sought to downplay the severity of the pandemic while raging at lockdowns that had shut down Tesla production — is now reportedly recruiting to start his own OpenAI competitor that would create an alternative to what he terms "woke AI."

If Musk’s AI venture had existed during the early days of the COVID pandemic, it’s easy to imagine him flexing his power by tweaking the model to promote hydroxychloroquine, sow doubt about lockdowns, or do anything else convenient to his financial bottom line or political whims. Next time there’s a comparable crisis, it’s hard to imagine there won’t be an ugly battle to control how AI chatbots are allowed to respond to users' questions about it.

The reality is that AI sits at a crossroads. Its potential may be significant, but its execution remains choppy, and whether its creators are able to smooth out the experience for users — or at least guarantee the accuracy of the information it presents — in a reasonable timeframe will probably make or break its long-term commercial potential. And even if they pull that off, the ideological and social implications will be formidable. 

One thing’s for sure, though: it’s not yet quite ready for prime time.

"It’s not ready for deployment yet in my opinion," Link said of BioGPT. "A lot more research, evaluation, and training/fine-tuning would be needed for any downstream applications."

More on AI: CNET Says It’s a Total Coincidence It’s Laying Off Humans After Publishing AI-Generated Articles

Sony shares dropped sharply yesterday when it was revealed that its biggest competition in the console space, Microsoft, bought Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion, potentially harvesting away a large portion of valuable games in the long term like Call of Duty, Overwatch and Diablo.

After the sale, there have been many cries from gamers that Sony needs to do something to “answer” Microsoft with a purchase of their own. But whichever side of the console war you may find yourself on, at this point, with Microsoft gifting blank checks to its Xbox division, these are no longer two entities that are directly comparable.

And yet, that doesn’t mean Sony is “doomed” either, and that should not be the takeaway narrative. In fact, presently, their gaming division has never been doing better. It’s complicated.

To start with, Sony simply cannot make purchases anywhere close the scale of what Microsoft is doing here. Even before this, Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda seemed like a massive move they couldn’t match. Now a $70 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard? There is nothing, not a thing, Sony can do to make a wave anywhere close to that big.

A purchase at that level would have to be something like EA, Ubisoft or Take-Two, which seems flat out impossible for a company about 7% as big as Microsoft (a $150 billion market cap versus a $2.2 trillion market cap). And a very large “middleground” purchase by Sony, say, Square Enix, Capcom, From Software, Kojima Productions still would not match either the Activision Blizzard or Bethesda purchases Microsoft has already made.

Similarly, I don’t think Sony can hope to match Game Pass as an entity either. We know Sony has plans to bolster PS Plus, potentially combining it with PS Now to offer more features and games, but it still seems exceptionally unlikely that Sony will offer its high profile exclusives on day one, something that is the core tenet of why Game Pass is so attractive. Sony absolutely wants to those tens of millions of sales, and has effectively doubled down on the idea by raising game prices $10 this generation. They view it as too much of a risk to do what Microsoft has done, and if they did, there would be no going back.

Finally, Sony does not have the native infrastructure to build the kind of cloud streaming network Microsoft is assembling for Xbox games. Only companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have that power, so it requires partnering with a third party, and they’re already pretty far behind where Microsoft has gotten to.

And yet, again, things are going great for Sony.

This past year, the PlayStation 5 would have been the fastest-selling game console in history by a wide margin, were it not for supply shortages. Their first party offerings have not dipped in quality for years, and the PS4 generation was capped off by The Last of Us Part II winning more GOTY titles than any other game in history. Sony has a massive collection of must-play first party titles while Microsoft is just starting to build up that kind of roster.

But there’s now, and there’s the future. Sony may end up feeling like Blockbuster if Microsoft keeps expanding its Netflix-like Game Pass, and the $70 price point already feels like a backwards move. The cloud as a way to expand access to gaming, in addition to Microsoft putting games day one on PC, also feels natural, and like something Sony is resisting. To me, it’s these things, not necessarily Microsoft’s mega-studio purchases, they need to be more acutely aware of. And really, Sony cannot make those kinds of buys anyway, so there’s no point really even debating about whether or not Sony should buy Ubisoft or Take-Two to “answer” this move. That isn’t the battle they can win.

I think Sony is perfectly secure for at least this entire next generation, barring any unforeseen disasters. But Microsoft is building something absolutely massive, and at some point, it does seem like Sony may end up eclipsed if they don’t figure out a way to move in the same direction.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.