Microsoft's $10 billion bet on OpenAI's ChatGPT — amid rogue app scandal

As per a report from Semafor, Microsoft is in talks to invest $10 billion in OpenAI, the owner of the popular AI tool ChatGPT.

The funding round will reportedly value OpenAI at a staggering $29 billion and is expected to include other venture firms as well. The deal was expected to be closed by the end of 2022, according to the documents sent to prospective investors, however, it is not confirmed whether the deal has been finalized or not. 

Back in 2019, the software giant had invested $1 billion in OpenAI, founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, where its cloud services arm has been providing the computing power needed by the AI firm.

The interest in OpenAI and its chatbot — which has the capability to generate haikus, debug code, and answer questions in human-like speech — is on the rise. Last year, Microsoft unveiled plans to integrate image-generation software from OpenAI into its search engine Bing. Also, recent reports suggest similar plans for ChatGPT as the company aims to take on the market leader Google Search.

According to the report, Microsoft will also receive 75% of OpenAI's profits until it recoups its initial investment and will have a 49% stake in the company, after which other investors will take another 49% and OpenAI's non-profit parent will get 2%.
 

The popularity and potential uses of ChatGPT have also raised concerns over the possibility of AI-enabled  plagiarism. 

Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton University, has created an app called "GPTZero" to detect whether text is written by the ChatGPT bot, in an effort to fight against increasing AI plagiarism.

The app has gained significant attention, with over 30,000 people trying it out within a week since its launch. On the other hand, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has also announced its commitment towards preventing AI plagiarism and other unethical uses of its technology by working on ways to "watermark" GPT-generated text.
 

Meanwhile, the surge in interest in OpenAI's ChatGPT has led to a proliferation of dubious apps that claim to offer access to the application, but are in fact not affiliated with OpenAI, or at best offer little or no real value.

Some of these apps have climbed the charts in the productivity category in various countries, while some have charged for access to the bot without providing additional functionality.

However, it is unclear what actions, if any, Apple and Google are taking to address this issue.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing model developed by OpenAI, which is capable of generating text that appears to be written by humans.

It is a variant of the GPT-3 family of large language models, which have gained significant attention in the AI community for their impressive performance in various natural language processing tasks. The model is trained on a large corpus of text, allowing it to generate coherent and natural-sounding responses to prompts, which can range from answering simple questions to writing complex essays.

The significance of ChatGPT lies in its ability to generate human-like text, making it useful for a variety of applications such as chatbots, code generation, content creation, and more. It has the potential to assist developers and businesses to create more engaging and personalized experiences for their users, while also reducing the time and effort needed to produce large amounts of text. 
 

Additionally, ChatGPT has shown to be particularly useful in fields such as language translation, text summarization, and information retrieval.