Microsoft invited 12 global media outlets to its headquarters in May 2023 for a two-day visit, with the itinerary focusing on topics related to artificial intelligence (AI), from various services integrating GPT-4 models to AI applications and regulations, demonstrating Microsoft's eagerness to fully embrace AI.
Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of AI platform at Microsoft, said he has never seen such an eager mobilization of all its staff in his 13 years of service at the company.
In fact, Microsoft, which once dominated the PC era, has lagged behind Apple, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in mobile devices, search engines and public cloud services, respectively, which emerged later. Only this time, its investment in Open AI has unexpectedly triggered a global AI craze, so how can it not take advantage of the victory to regain its lost ground?
AI first appeared as early as the 1950s, when Alan Turing's epoch-making paper predicted the possibility of creating intelligent machines and proposed the Turing test, ushering in the concept of an AI age. Due to a variety of environmental factors, AI entered a cold winter until machine learning in the 1990s and deep learning in 2020, when artificial intelligence formed its first blossoms, yet still far from human relevance until the latest emergence of ChatGPT.
Most people still regard AI as a new gadget, and the more faulty the answer given by ChatGPT, the more interesting it its. Some feel threatened by the new era of AI brought by ChatGPT, projecting their imagination onto reality from the movie plots of past films such as The Terminator and The Matrix, with the belief that AI will destroy human beings.
However, compared with the above-mentioned general impressions brought by ChatGPT, Microsoft has combined the large language models of GPT-4 with its original service products and really put them into practice between you and me, addressing the pain points that existing software cannot solve, so as to make work proceed more smoothly. It also makes people really feel that AI is around you and me, and it is useful, not just for leisure and entertainment.
Through AI, Microsoft can make its users of word processing software services become stickier and can also improve its product operations through AI value-added services. In addition, AI can also drive up Azure's business performance. Also, AI can affect Microsoft's two major businesses: Productivity and Business Process, and Intelligent Cloud.
According to Microsoft's latest financial report for the third quarter of 2023 fiscal year released at the end of April, its productivity and business process revenue rose 11% on year to US$17.5 billion and its intelligent cloud revenue increased 16% on year to US$22.1 billion, respectively accounting for 33% and 41% of the company's total revenues. The combined annual revenue from Microsoft's search business and news advertising business reached only US$3.2 billion in fiscal 2022.
During the two-day AI journey, Microsoft introduced all AI products and arranged interviews with various executives, making visitors fully feel the company's ambition to regain the right to speak in the AI domain, but whether it will come true remains to be seen. However, this wave of ChatGPT-triggered AI adoption is not expected to be as short-lived as the metaverse or NFT (non-fungible token) applications, and the advent of the new AI era must be taken seriously.
Article translated by Willis Ke
