Microsoft has been incorporating conversational AI models into its products that are developed by OpenAI, the company which made ChatGPT. However, the Windows maker has been working on its own conversational AI models for relatively smaller use cases. A report has claimed that the software maker has now formed a team to develop such models to cater to the needs of less financially sound businesses.
Citing two people familiar with the matter, The Information reported that Microsoft has formed a new team to develop conversational AI that requires less computing power compared to software it’s using from OpenAI.
It added that the software maker moved several top AI developers from its research group to the new GenAI team. The investments in AI space have pushed the company ahead of Apple, briefly overtaking it to become the world’s most valuable publicly-listed company.
Microsoft’s Plan B
The latest report is a followup of a previous one by the publication which suggested that Microsoft researchers and product teams are working on a plan B as the costs of running advanced AI models rise. Microsoft recently announced ‘Microsoft Copilot Pro’ for $20 per month/per user. This version is claimed to offer more powerful capabilities, including ‘advanced help with writing, coding, designing, researching or learning, Copilot Pro brings greater performance, productivity and creativity.’
Peter Lee, who oversees Microsoft’s 1,500 researchers, reportedly directed many of the team members to develop conversational AI that may not perform as well as OpenAI but that is smaller in size and costs far less to operate.
Microsoft Phi-2 language model
Last year, Microsoft released a small language model called Phi-2 which is easier and more cost-effective to train as compared to GPT-4. The company said that on benchmarks like commonsense reasoning, language understanding, math, and coding, Phi-2 can outperform the 13B Llama-2 and 7B Mistral, 70B Llama-2 LLM, Google Gemini Nano which natively runs on Google Pixel 8 Pro.
Citing two people familiar with the matter, The Information reported that Microsoft has formed a new team to develop conversational AI that requires less computing power compared to software it’s using from OpenAI.
It added that the software maker moved several top AI developers from its research group to the new GenAI team. The investments in AI space have pushed the company ahead of Apple, briefly overtaking it to become the world’s most valuable publicly-listed company.
Microsoft’s Plan B
The latest report is a followup of a previous one by the publication which suggested that Microsoft researchers and product teams are working on a plan B as the costs of running advanced AI models rise. Microsoft recently announced ‘Microsoft Copilot Pro’ for $20 per month/per user. This version is claimed to offer more powerful capabilities, including ‘advanced help with writing, coding, designing, researching or learning, Copilot Pro brings greater performance, productivity and creativity.’
Peter Lee, who oversees Microsoft’s 1,500 researchers, reportedly directed many of the team members to develop conversational AI that may not perform as well as OpenAI but that is smaller in size and costs far less to operate.
Microsoft Phi-2 language model
Last year, Microsoft released a small language model called Phi-2 which is easier and more cost-effective to train as compared to GPT-4. The company said that on benchmarks like commonsense reasoning, language understanding, math, and coding, Phi-2 can outperform the 13B Llama-2 and 7B Mistral, 70B Llama-2 LLM, Google Gemini Nano which natively runs on Google Pixel 8 Pro.