I wouldn’t count on Microsoft being ineffective, but there’s good reason to think they’ll push for applications for the current state of the art over further blue sky capabilities stuff. The commitment to push copilot into every Microsoft product is already happening, the copilot tab is live in dozens of places in their software and in most it works as expected. It’s already good enough to replace 80%+ of the armies of temps and offshore warm bodies that push spreadsheets and forms around today without any further big capabilities gains, and that’s a plenty huge market to sate public investors. Sure more capabilities gets you more markets, but what they have now probably gets the entire AI division self-supporting on cashflow, or at least able to help with the skyrocketing costs of compute, plus funding the coming legal and lobbying battles over training data.
I wouldn’t count on Microsoft being ineffective, but there’s good reason to think they’ll push for applications for the current state of the art over further blue sky capabilities stuff. The commitment to push copilot into every Microsoft product is already happening, the copilot tab is live in dozens of places in their software and in most it works as expected. It’s already good enough to replace 80%+ of the armies of temps and offshore warm bodies that push spreadsheets and forms around today without any further big capabilities gains, and that’s a plenty huge market to sate public investors. Sure more capabilities gets you more markets, but what they have now probably gets the entire AI division self-supporting on cashflow, or at least able to help with the skyrocketing costs of compute, plus funding the coming legal and lobbying battles over training data.