The Six Five team discusses Microsoft’s AI Announcements.
If you are interested in watching the full episode you can check it out here.
Disclaimer: The Six Five Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Daniel Newman: OpenAI and Bing continue to move forward. And I think, was it… and just let me make sure I got this data right Pat, but this week basically Microsoft announced that the AI part, Bing, is in open preview now. So this means that where you and I, because we have, we’re insiders, we’re able to get early access, we’ve been playing with this for some time now, people more broadly are going to be able to take advantage of this. And there was some data that was revealed. Because I think a lot of people are wondering…Bing is I think, the third-largest search engine, technically speaking, and that the company obviously sees a $2 billion per 1% of market gain. That’s what they shared on their finance day, during their initial launch of their OpenAI partnership.
So if Microsoft can go from single digit to say 20%, I think I calculated as something like a $26 billion a year annual financial opportunity for the company, that’s pretty significant. But the problem with Bing – and Pat, you and I might differ in our opinions, is when I used Bing versus Google, at least in the traditional search days, it just didn’t cut the mustard for me. It was not good enough in terms of being able to find what I needed to find. With OpenAI, with Chat GPT-4 being embedded inside of Bing, it did change the equation. So now the company came out talking a little bit about what this has meant for the organization. They gave some data. I think they said that in the last three months there’s been over half a billion search queries in Bing. And that during this period of time they’ve seen their growth in users hit over 100 million. I don’t know that that’s daily actives, that would be pretty remarkable if that’s where it’s at. But that’s a really, really big growth rate for the company.
The company has also been very focused on making Bing visual, meaning that Bing… and that’s one thing right now if you play with Bard, it does not do. It should, and it will. Pat you and I were talking about how cool it’ll be when they integrate a YouTube engine to be able to ingest something like a podcast. But first and foremost, how can you do more visual. So they’re doing image and video with Bing right now. They’re also adding more and more multi-session. So meaning you can go back into your histories and continue conversations. That’s something that’s being added. And by the way, here’s probably the third thing that’s really interesting and that we haven’t talked a lot about is where does the developer fit into all this? For the last three or four years have we talked about something as probably a great career opportunity more than developing? If you can do something in your career, you should learn to code.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: Coding will be the future, and as long as you know how to code, you’ll always be employable. Boy does that feel like a different conversation today. I’m not saying that being a great coder won’t still have an opportunity, but with all the speech-to-code, and the capabilities that are being discussed right now, even if it doesn’t work today, how long of a horizon do we really have, before the speech-to-code or the augmented code that’s being done with natural language processing through these large language models becomes really, really good?
And I don’t know if you’ve read across the internet yet, Pat, but some really good coders have written some stuff. I’ve read some sub stacks and other things that they’re using this. So where it used to be GitHub, and you were sharing open source, and nobody codes anything from scratch anymore. That’s kind of the thing. And now you have… you’re taking things that are already sort of pre-built, and you’re then adding co-pilot, and then you’re adding the capability for large language models in generative. We’re going to build tools really, really fast, and it’s going to happen really quick. I wrote an article on it. It’ll post today on the Futurum Research blog. And by the way, I wrote it with GPT-4. I dictated some notes after I read the release with all the data, and I pushed it through GPT-4 and then I took it live because I don’t know, I’m a bot now. What the hell? All right, Pat, over to you.
Patrick Moorhead: I use Microsoft Bing and Edge AI features every day. And Daniel, you were right when you first said it is, in fact, a hundred million daily active users, which is pretty incredible. Two big messages here. First of all, opening this up to everybody and open… I mean it’s literally open. Anybody can get access to this. You don’t have to be on a list. That, in itself, shows the degree of maturity and the only reason they’re calling it a preview is because it’s not perfect. And preview allows them, if they see somebody pulls up something that’s just wrong, it’ll probably be preview for a long time. That’s that. That’s just my guess to be conservative.
What I really liked about this, it hits some of the things, some of the snags in my own experience. And not that it’s all about me, Daniel, but sometimes it’s about me. And I do think that being an active user of this technology, I have a higher bar for that. So first of all, the Edge helper that’s out there just didn’t cut it for summarizing documents for me. Now it works better with PDFs, it works better with websites. And I saw it actually will work with YouTube video links. And I am so excited and I think people are going to be so excited to use this. They also integrated images into… I used to have to do separate image versus text, but now you’re going to be getting image results back, which again, it’s simplification, right? People don’t necessarily want to go to a separate place in text versus imagery.
So anyways, net net, I think we have to use this announcement, at least I am, that Microsoft is in the lead with consumers on this. Not that Google won’t catch up, but when you open it up to the planet and the other company hasn’t, what are you going to say? Right? It’s just a fact. Not even necessarily opinion. So I love this drag race. It’s all about innovation. Innovation is good, innovation lowers costs, innovation increases capabilities, and we have an amazing race here in consumer, and very clear, this is consumer, not commercial. I am doubly excited to see… I want to use Office 365 with generative AI.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
