This article offers a comprehensive exploration of the collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI, delving into the factors driving this partnership and its implications. Key insights include:
- Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s CTO, views AI as a tool that empowers non-programmers to code, a perspective shaped by his upbringing in rural poverty. This highlights AI’s potential to democratize technology.
- How Copilot got its name and why it’s such a fitting name
- Copilot is the result of Microsoft and OpenAI’s partnership
- That Microsoft is pinning its future on Copilot and, in turn, OpenAI
- That the primarily academic and non-business makeup of the OpenAI non-profit board was either 100% correct in firing Altman and we should all be petrified of what is happening there or they were all totally out of their depth in running the board. Only time will tell what is true here.
- The challenge of getting users to understand that Copilot isn’t perfect, isn’t always right but that doesn’t mean it can’t be very helpful
I couldn’t put this piece down, in part because it helped me crystalize my understanding of MS’s vision for Copilot. Copilot will be both an enormous shift in how we work day to day but also, so integrated and unobtrusive in our workflow that we won’t really feel how much it’s changed how we’re working together until we look back at pre Copilot days.
It would have been good to get some alternate viewpoints to the “generative AI is amazing and is going to make the world a better place” and some specific discussion around the dangers. But, the challenge there, is that
Scott, though, believed in a more optimistic story. At one point, he told me, about seventy per cent of Americans worked in agriculture. Technological advances reduced those labor needs, and today just 1.2 per cent of the workforce farms. But that doesn’t mean there are millions of out-of-work farmers: many such people became truck drivers, or returned to school and became accountants, or found other paths. “Perhaps to a greater extent than any technological revolution preceding it, A.I. could be used to revitalize the American Dream,” Scott has written.
Scott wanted A.I. to empower the kind of resourceful but digitally unschooled people he’d grown up among. This was a striking argument—one that some technologists would consider willfully naïve, given widespread concerns about A.I.-assisted automation eliminating jobs such as the grocery-store cashier, the factory worker, or the movie extra.
GitHub employees brainstormed names for the product: Coding Autopilot, Automated Pair Programmer, Programarama Automat. Friedman was an amateur pilot, and he and others felt these names wrongly implied that the tool would do all the work. The tool was more like a co-pilot—someone who joins you in the cockpit and makes suggestions, while occasionally proposing something off base. Usually you listen to a co-pilot; sometimes you ignore him. When Scott heard Friedman’s favored choice for a name—GitHub Copilot—he loved it. “It trains you how to think about it,” he told me. “It perfectly conveys its strengths and weaknesses.”
Nine years later, the company created Tay, an A.I. chatbot designed to mimic the inflections and preoccupations of a teen-age girl. The chatbot was set up to interact with Twitter users, and almost immediately Tay began posting racist, sexist, and homophobic content, including the statement “Hitler was right.”
Kevin Scott believes that the discourse around A.I. has been strangely focussed on dystopian scenarios, and has largely ignored its potential to “level the playing field” for people who know what they want computers to do but lack the training to make it happen.
Then, to add yet another layer of protection, Microsoft started running GPT-4 on hundreds of computers and set them to converse with one another—millions of exchanges apiece—with instructions to get other machines to say something untoward. Each time a new lapse was generated, the meta-prompts and other customizations were adjusted accordingly. Then the process began anew. After months of honing, the result was a version of GPT-4 unique to Microsoft’s needs and attitudes, which invisibly added dozens, sometimes hundreds, of instructions to each user inquiry.
The Copilot designers also concluded that they needed to encourage users to essentially become hackers—to devise tricks and workarounds to overcome A.I.’s limitations and even unlock some uncanny capacities.
The dismissed board members, meanwhile, insist that their actions were wise.
“A.I. is one of the most powerful things humans have ever invented for improving the quality of life of everyone,” Scott said. “But it will take time. It should take time.” He added, “We’ve always tackled super-challenging problems through technology. And so we can either tell ourselves a good story about the future or a bad story about the future—and, whichever one we choose, that’s probably the one that’ll come true.”