When Microsoft first launched its Bing Chat chatbot AI in February, many users found that it generated some rather odd and even some very personal answers to some chat questions from the first public users. As a result, Microsoft quickly capped the number of daily chat turns and in-session chats to a small number, in order to avoid some of those odd interactions. (Microsoft has since expanded those chat limits).
As it turned out. Microsoft was warned by its partner OpenAI that Bing Chat might create these kinds of interactions because it was still working with an under-development version of GPT-4. The Wall Street Journal reports, via unnamed sources, that OpenAI expressed concerns that Microsoft was moving too fast to launch Bing Chat with these issues. Those concerns turned out to be very accurate.
The same article also claims that Microsoft has its own concerns about working with OpenAI. Some of Microsoft"s many divisions still cannot directly contact or work with OpenAI, according to the story.
While Microsoft has indeed invested a ton of money into the company, OpenAI can still license ChatGPT-4 to other companies so they can develop their own AI products. One of those companies is DuckDuckGo, a search engine that uses Microsoft"s Bing search API for some of its searches. In March, DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, its own chatbot that would have used OpenAI"s ChatGPT-3.
However, the Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft said it would raise the price of its API if DuckDuckGo went ahead with DuckAssist. As a result, just a few weeks after it was announced, the search engine quietly updated its blog post, stating, "Unfortunately, DuckAssist is no longer available on DuckDuckGo Private Search."
So why doesn"t Microsoft just acquire OpenAI and bring it fully under the company"s wing? Right now, there"s no word on if Microsoft has attempted to make such a deal. In a new Wired interview this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would not comment if the company has tried to purchase OpenAI.