Microsoft's sexy 'GenAI' rebrand

Is Satya Nadella the 'Michael Jordan' of tech CEOs? And will GenAI power drug discovery?

Hello all,

It’s not even mid-January, and some of those 2023 predictions I made for the Generative AI space are already manifesting in a big way.

First, the tech titans are making their GenAI plays. Talking about plays, has Microsoft played an absolute blinder? I saw their CEO Satya Nadella referred to as the ‘Michael Jordan’ of tech CEOs in a viral LinkedIn post regarding its new ‘AI’ status.

It may all seem like ‘monopoly money’ at this point — but a $10bn Microsoft investment for 75% of Open AI’s profits, followed by a 49% stake in the company (as well as exclusivity for Azure to provide compute presumably), doesn’t seem like a bad bet to me. One might even ask if it’s pretty ‘cheap’ for Microsoft.

On the flip side, the deal would catapult Open AI’s generative models — from the GPTs to the DALLEs — straight into Microsoft’s products, and to hundreds of millions (even billions?) of people within months. With over 70% of the desktop, tablet and console OS market, Microsoft Windows is the most widely-used computer operating system in the world. Since the open release of Stable Diffusion by Stability AI, Open AI has aggressively sought to ensure its dominance.

This brings me to one of my second predictions — the billions of dollars of investment I predicted would flow into the space. Well, they are well and truly flowing. Some people will get very rich, and others will lose badly. Separating the wheat from the chaff will be the order of the day.

The investment hysteria and the hype cycle begin!

This week Henry and I discuss:

1. Microsoft’s Generative AI ‘rebrand’

• Microsoft’s $10bn investment bid in Open AI — a partnership or more of an acquisition?

• Microsoft’s ‘rebrand’ as an exciting AI player — including the resurgence of Bing?

• Can Open AI maintain its mission to develop AI for humanity?

  Ben Tossell @bentossell

  The real AI winner: Microsoft - $1bn in OpenAI (2019) - Owns GitHub which released Copilot - Dalle powers Bing Image Creator - Valle which produces an AI voice from 3s of input - GPT in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook etc - GPT-powered Bing - $10bn, 49% stake in OpenAI + 75% profit

2. Could generative text models run out of training data?

• Will generative text models run dry with no more training data by 2026?

• How could GPT-4 improve on GPT-3?

• How will synthetic data be used in future?

• Will generative models continually need more training data — or is that fallacy?

3. ITV’s ‘Deepfake Neighbour Wars’ ft J-Zay, Rihanna and Kim Kardashian

• British broadcaster ITV is set to release ‘Deepfake Neighbour Wars’ - a comedy show featuring deepfaked celebrities.

• Deepfakes of Jay-Z, Kim Kardashian and Greta Thunberg argue about broken patio tiles.

• What does this mean for the non-consensual appropriation of one’s digital identity — is it permissible for satire?

  Broadcast @Broadcastnow

  “We were careful to make this daft and silly, and have scenarios where people aren’t going to think it’s the real Greta or the real Idris” - behind the scenes on Deep Fake Neighbour Wars

  

  bit.lyDeep Fake Neighbour Wars: Faking it for laughsTiger Aspect’s Deep Fake Neighbour Wars uses state-of-the-art technology to show ‘celebrities’ feuding with each other over the garden fence

4. DALLE ‘AI-art’ that was real

• Drama on Reddit as an artist had their work removed from ‘ r/art’ after it was falsely identified as AI-generated.

• The problem with AI-content detection tools.

• The ‘liars’ dividend’: being able to dismiss anything authentic as AI-generated.

  Reddit Lies @reddit_lies

  r/Art is banning artists who have styles "too similar to AI generated art."

  

5. Generative AI drug discovery

• Generative AI is speeding up new drug discovery.

• Absci, a biotech company, uses generative AI models to build new antibodies.

• Generative AI’s potential to lead to breakthroughs in biology and medicine.

  Absci @abscibio

  Today, we announce a breakthrough in AI drug design: we are the first to design AND validate new therapeutic antibodies with zero-shot #generativeAI. De novo antibodies are here! Read our preprint: bit.ly/3GRcsO5 #JPM23

  

Breakthrough or Bullshit?

Finally, for Breakthrough and Bullshit, Henry and I were decisive this week. The idea we will run out of ‘training data’ is bullshit! And while we are not medical experts, we both agree that Generative AI is a breakthrough as a medium for scientific discovery.

Enjoy your weekend — I have a great interview with of the ‘original’ founders in this space dropping next week.

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Namaste for now,

Nina