Microsoft is spreading OpenAI around to keep software developers interested in its platforms

On the first day, Tuesday, there was a conversation onstage between Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder. Scott is credited with establishing the unusually close partnership between the two companies.

OpenAI released ChatGPT in November to the world, generating a lot of interest among consumers. Companies like Atlassian, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce were quick to integrate OpenAI's GPT-4, the large language model that powers the chatbot. GPT-4, as well as alternatives from Amazon and Google, have been trained using extensive internet data sets. They are now able to spit out chunks that sound natural.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated during his Build keynote speech on Tuesday that "every layer of the software stack will be forever changed and there is no better place to begin than the actual developer's stack. How we, as developers build, is fundamentally evolving."

Third-party developers are essential to Microsoft's software properties such as the Microsoft 365 bundle of productivity software. Microsoft's Teams app, for instance, could become a hub for a growing number of processes and tasks. This can make it less likely that companies will switch to Google Workspace or other alternatives.

Microsoft showcased dozens of plug-in developers on Tuesday. These included Adobe, Asana Canva, Cloudflare Redfin Spotify TripAdvisor. In a demonstration, the Windows chatbot turned on a Spotify Playlist, created a company logo using Adobe Express, and sent the logo to a person’s colleagues via Teams in response to typed messages.

Nadella has also pushed Microsoft to integrate GPT-4 directly into Teams, and older Microsoft products such as Bing, resulting in bots that are branded, Copilot. The Copilot term emphasizes collaboration with people in contrast to (for example) Tesla's Autopilot advanced driver assistance system.

Scott Guthrie told CNBC last week that "we are adding Copilot to everything"."It's not a top-down directive, but we are pushing top-down."I think we've evangelized it internally and got everyone excited about it. We are building a Microsoft stack that the whole company builds on."

"I believe we did a 70 percent price reduction two years back," he said to Scott."In essence, this past year we achieved a 90% reduction in costs. It's insane, right? A cost reduction of 10 times is crazy. I think we will be able to do the same thing with new models. GPT-4 is expensive and not available in full. But I think that will change."

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