Last Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI were named as defendants in another class action lawsuit alleging violations of multiple data protection laws.
This is the second class action lawsuit the two companies have faced since the start of the year and marks the beginning of their multi-billion dollar partnership.
In a US court case, the two companies were accused of using web harvesting techniques to steal private information from millions of Internet users, including children, without their informed consent or knowledge, in order to develop ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) models ) to build.
Earlier this year, OpenAI was also accused of exposing the intellectual property of ChatGPT users, leading to a number of companies banning the robot’s use in the workplace.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft announced Azure ChatGPT, an enterprise solution it described as “your private ChatGPT,” while also acknowledging the shortcomings of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in a since-deleted post.
This came as OpenAI was preparing to release its own enterprise version of ChatGPT.
Rumors of a rift between the two companies continued to circulate as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified on .
Azure ChatGPT has now been removed from the GitHub repository and Microsoft has denied the existence of a “product called Azure ChatGPT” in an interview with Analytics India Mag. But it was enough to reveal a complicated relationship between the two companies.
Is it dramatic?
Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI was a perfect technological exchange. OpenAI would build the core models that would power Microsoft’s services, and Microsoft would cover the cloud costs on Azure.
But OpenAI’s privacy failures, colossal IT costs and mounting losses have led Microsoft to slowly give up, says a report by Analytics India Mag.
“Microsoft is concerned about the current negative perception of OpenAI’s enterprise data security,” the report said. “By introducing Azure ChatGPT, they are working to restore trust between companies and attract more customers. They don’t want to be associated with the OpenAI name on Azure, so they brought the Azure name to the forefront. »
But there is no tension, explained Forrester principal analyst Rowan Curran, just a market attitude at the moment that people have a negative perception of OpenAI because they see Microsoft as a trustworthy provider.
He added that the perception that OpenAI is “an insecure platform that will expose all your data is simply not true.” Whether you use OpenAI APIs on Azure or directly on OpenAI, you get the same type of data sharing agreement you would expect from a free service, he said, emphasizing that business elements will take time to set up.
Although Microsoft has removed Azure ChatGPT, its plan to sell a new version of data company Databricks’ software to help customers build AI applications for their businesses would once again put it in direct competition with OpenAI’s offerings, explained Beatriz Valle, technology analyst at GlobalData. The same goes for Microsoft’s upcoming AI-based collaboration software Copilot, which will compete with ChatGPT Premium.
Microsoft’s recent association with Metas Llama 2 also appears to have strained relations with OpenAI and created competition for its closed models.
But for Rowan Curran, this means that Microsoft has just realized that open source will play a very important role in the vast ecosystem of language models and in meeting the needs of all its customers. The Llama family of models, he added, is one of the best options for companies: a commercial-use model that they can run with a smaller footprint and more local hardware.
Additionally, Beatriz Valle pointed out that OpenAI is in a “vulnerable position” “due to revenue imbalances caused by massive cloud computing spending,” but is still in its infancy. “In the early days of the generative AI market, it will take time to assess the level of acceptance of offerings like ChatGPT Enterprise.
Regardless, Curran said OpenAI’s ability to transform its business into a profitable model is not as important in the short term as its success as a technology enabler for Microsoft.
“It’s important to recognize that Microsoft invested in OpenAI, among other things, to integrate the technology into Azure, so Microsoft didn’t necessarily have to develop this technology in-house and didn’t necessarily have to take over everything.” “The organizational resources and the cultural baggage that exist in a large company,” said Rowan Curran. “So I think just focusing on OpenAI’s profitability ignores the fact that they are currently on the right track as a technology enabler for their current most important partner, which is Microsoft. »
The original article is available on IT World Canada, a sister publication of Direction IT.
Adaptation and French translation by Renaud Larue-Langlois.