Pi (their chat bot) is pretty nice to talk to. It’s really good with the whole para-social aspect of chatting without being weird. Is that useful? Maybe for research, probably less so for a direct product.Microsoft can probably get something useful from that.
More importantly though, Microsoft is now hosting a whole suite of LLMs on Azure. This is the lesson they learned after OpenAI had that acute leadership crisis. This is another hedge against OpenAI. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft start distancing themselves from OpenAI in the future.
Pi is nice to talk to because unlike other chatbots, it always, always, always asks a follow-up question. I'd love to see the system prompt. That's what's driving their claim of high engagement—the bot just keeps drilling you with questions, and for some people, the bait is irresistible.
Not only follow up questions, but it also gives straight answers without bs, lecturing the user, claiming the model is somehow limited or flat out refusals which are Gemini's specialty.
He has ZERO technical skills. ZERO hardcore STEM background. He was just friends with Demis at the right time and road that hype train.
At Google he had a similar role VP of AI products or something and he contributed nothing (except all the garbage ethics, safety crap that didn't help google, probably kneecapped it actually)
AI safety and ethics are a big deal. Nobody wants to buy a big heap of linear algebra. A big heap of linear algebra that is so close to becoming sentient that we have to plan what its ethics should be? Where do I put my money?!?
If you ask engineers to sell linear algebra, they invent things like control systems, which are too tricky to sell.
Pi (their chat bot) is pretty nice to talk to. It’s really good with the whole para-social aspect of chatting without being weird. Is that useful? Maybe for research, probably less so for a direct product.Microsoft can probably get something useful from that.
More importantly though, Microsoft is now hosting a whole suite of LLMs on Azure. This is the lesson they learned after OpenAI had that acute leadership crisis. This is another hedge against OpenAI. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft start distancing themselves from OpenAI in the future.