THE LAUNCH OF MICROSOFT’S COPILOT, POWERED BY GPT-4

"Ordinarily, I wouldn't comment on office applications, but this is a game-changer. It's an extraordinarily aggressive move by Microsoft to gain a first-mover advantage by bringing AI to millions of desktops worldwide. It explains their enormous investment in OpenAI and presages new AI applications.

"The launch of ChatGPT only five months ago was the inflexion point for AI, making AI accessible to everyone curious and sparking a swathe of AI start-ups, building utilities and applications on these foundation models. Now Copilot and Bing will put AI on practically every desktop.

"Although people may initially resist the idea of using AI, the ability to do things like summarise long documents and prioritise your email inbox will be an absolute godsend for most people struggling to cope with the everincreasing volume of information we have to get through every day.

"Writers, copyrighters, screenwriters, and journalists will have to integrate these new tools if they want to match the productivity of their competitors. "Those in the education sector desperately trying to close the stable door will find the horse has bolted and burned the stable down. There's no way back from this. AI will be available to every school child and student as a matter of routine, as a matter of right. So educators need to rethink how we assess students and how we prove that they've acquired the knowledge and skills we expect of them. We'll also have to start teaching how to use these tools, for example, how to fact-check, how to explore the provenance of sources, and how not to use AI-generated material blindly.

"I find it interesting that we all thought AI was going to be the cold, logical, authoritative source of information, as portrayed in science fiction in the past. It now appears that AI will be used to create images, words, music, and speeches and that humans will be the fact-checkers and guardians of the truth. We can only hope.

"My guess is that the next step will be for Microsoft and others to offer enterprise bolt-ons to Copilot that incorporates all the corporate knowledge in a particular company, thus allowing customised versions of Copilot to provide bespoke help to individual companies.

"There is a question of information leakage in the adoption of these AI, especially if the AI is allowed to learn from its interactions with users and its access to corporate data.

"This is yet another blow for Google as companies who have invested in the Google office suite, which grew massively during the pandemic as users shifted to the cloud, may be asking themselves if they backed the right horse."

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Gan Golan, Climate Clock Co-Founder

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Andrew Boyd, Climate Clock Co-Founder