Identity Crisis: Microsoft Becomes Nothing More Than Just An 'IT For OpenAI'

18/03/2024

Microsoft is known for many things, and its success has long been tied in its operating system dominance.

When it was founded, the company shot up when it created MS-DOS, and later Windows. Since then, Microsoft established Windows as the foundation of personal computing. Through strategic partnerships and licensing agreements, Microsoft ensured widespread adoption of its operating systems, leading to a near-universal presence on PCs.

This dominance provided Microsoft with a significant competitive advantage, solidifying its position in the technology industry and paving the way for its continued growth and influence.

While the company always has a competing edge when pitted against other rivals, nothing ever changed it from what it is.

Until OpenAI came in.

OpenAI - Microsoft

Following its partnership with the AI company, some Microsoft insiders are starting to worry.

They worry is because the company has become too focused on its partnership with OpenAI, that it starting to show less care towards its own AI products.

Some even said that the software giant has literally become a glorified IT department for OpenAI.

From the way the company was so fast in embedding OpenAI's product to its own products, and how it contribute to responsible AI, and explore the potential of cutting-edge language models like GPT-4, Microsoft seems to be so obsessed.

While its partnership with OpenAI aims to create valuable experiences for users, Microsoft was historically an organization with many in-house AI.

With Microsoft seemingly becoming just a promotor of OpenAI, this created some resentment and led to the departure of some executives who had worked on Microsoft's homegrown AI initiatives.

The group at the center of this is Microsoft's AI Platform team, which is ran by Eric Boyd.

Insiders said that some people in Microsoft think that the company is focusing less on the internal services that previously made up Azure AI Services and more on the Azure OpenAI service.

One former executive who left as a result of the changes said products like Azure Cognitive Search, Azure AI Bot Service, and Kinect DK are practically no more.

Frank Shaw said these services exist in some form but either aren't part of the Azure AI org, have been renamed, or have been bundled with other products.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft

The former Microsoft executive went on to explain that:

"The former Azure AI is basically just tech support for OpenAI."

"Eric Boyd is effectively maintaining the OpenAI service. It's less of an innovation engine than it once was. Now it's more IT for OpenAI. The beating heart of innovation is elsewhere."

But nevertheless, Microsoft is a company that conducts business for profit, and partnering with OpenAI is one of the most beneficial partnerships the company has ever had.

The partnership is so important for Microsoft, that Azure OpenAI service has hundreds of developers supporting customers of Microsoft's Azure cloud service who use OpenAI's GPT models.

Some Microsoft employees work so closely with OpenAI that they can freely enter OpenAI's offices, and some OpenAI employees can also enter freely into Microsoft hardquarters.

"It's not very innovative, but it's a good business strategy."