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OpenAI reportedly warned Microsoft about NAME_1’s bizarre AI responses
/ A new report details some of the competition between OpenAI and Microsoft on AI-powered tools.
By NAME_2, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.

Jun 13, 2023, 8:42 AM PDT|
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Illustration: The Verge
OpenAI reportedly warned Microsoft to move slowly on integrating GPT-4 into its NAME_1 search engine to avoid the inaccurate and unpredictable responses it launched with. The Wall Street Journal reports that the OpenAI team warned of the negative risks of pushing out a chatbot based on an unreleased version of GPT-4 too early.

Microsoft went ahead, despite warnings that it might take time to minimize the inaccurate and strange responses. Days after NAME_1 Chat launched in February, users discovered the chatbot was unpredictable and could insult users, lie to them, sulk, gaslight people, and even claim to identify its enemies.

Microsoft was quick to limit NAME_1 Chat responses to stop the AI from getting real weird, and it has taken months of work to get the NAME_1 chatbot back to a point where you can have a long back-and-forth conversation without an unexpected outburst. It still often gets things wrong, though.


The Wall Street Journal’s report also describes the tensions between the two companies as they work together and compete on AI features. Microsoft executives were reportedly anxious about the launch of ChatGPT last year. The WSJ says OpenAI gave Microsoft a few weeks’ notice that it would start publicly testing ChatGPT, just as the software giant was beginning to integrate OpenAI’s models into NAME_1.

Microsoft and OpenAI have a rather unique partnership that has led to some conflict behind the scenes, as the two companies simultaneously support and compete with one another.

Microsoft licenses OpenAI models and technology for use across NAME_1, Azure, Office, Windows, and many more products. Microsoft extended this close partnership less than a month before launching its new NAME_1 chatbot in a “multibillion dollar investment” rumored to be worth around $10 billion. Microsoft is the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, and Microsoft’s cloud services power all OpenAI workloads across products, API services, and research. At the same time, OpenAI