Why Microsoft’s AI Solutions Have Cornered the Market

A few days ago, Meta announced its Llama-2 model, which by most accounts blows all other generative language models out of the water. What these two AI solutions have in common is that they're both partnered with Microsoft. By providing significant funding to OpenAI, Microsoft has secured a place for itself in the market for early adopters of AI solutions.

Why did Microsoft do this? And what does it mean for the future of AI and software development?

Microsoft’s Strategy

Microsoft has long known that forcing home users to buy licenses is a no-win situation. The whole process has long since led to widespread piracy of Windows. Microsoft has never been able to win this battle. Despite lobbying and public shaming, piracy is alive and well today.

But Microsoft Windows has become the most popular operating system in the world despite piracy, or some would say because of it. Because so many people use it, Microsoft has established Windows as the default operating system for most businesses.

Although Microsoft has had several CEOs over the years, including founder Bill Gates, I would argue that none have been as strategic as current CEO Satya Nadella. I have no idea if he is the strategic genius behind all these initiatives or if he has great advisors. But there is an art to choosing great advisors.

If you've followed my previous posts, you know that I don't like to extrapolate from intentions, but from actions and results. This is because people often lie to themselves to the point where they are blind to their own motivations. The most reliable way to determine intention is to infer it from the result of the action.

So let's look at all the great things Microsoft has done under Nadella's leadership.

Microsoft’s Acquisitions

Over the years, Microsoft has acquired the biggest players in their respective markets. LinkedIn, which is still the default professional networking platform around the world, was acquired in 2016. Github was acquired in 2018. Now, with the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, they are acquiring some of the biggest video game franchises of all time, such as Call of Duty, Diablo, StarCraft, and Warcraft.

But it goes beyond that. Take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Video games have 3D artists. A lot of them. And Activision Blizzard has some of the best. Imagine empowering those people with AI solutions straight from the lab.

The lowest of the low-hanging fruit would be AI-powered CAD tools. CAD stands for computer-aided design. These tools are most commonly used in engineering fields such as construction or automotive.

Now, the professional CAD tools are pretty decent. But there's no shortage of engineers who use CAD and curse the tools every day. And the same goes for tools like Blender or Maya.
With prompt-to-image and image-to-3Dmodel or prompt-to-3D coming soon, there's a bucket full of possibilities.

The cost savings alone of being able to push out code and graphics at record speeds could mean that Activision Blizard could pump out high-quality personalized AI video games in record time.

In addition, the same tools could be licensed to engineering firms to iron out their designs at a fraction of the cost, making their in-house solution the new industry standard.

Microsoft’s AI Solutions

And speaking of new industry standards, the same can be said for their artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.

Given the adaptability of AI and machine learning solutions, we can expect that most companies that are already looking to automate their business processes will look to use AI to their advantage.

The biggest issue is privacy. You can't just connect your internal servers to the Internet. That's where Microsoft comes in.

All cloud solutions are the same. It's just using someone else's computer. The magic is in what services are provided in that cloud package.

And Microsoft has already integrated Meta & OpenAI solutions into its Azure cloud. The idea is to offer these services to enterprise customers as a secure alternative to using the public ChatGPT.

Now, while everyone is focused on ChatGPT, many forget that Github is also owned by Microsoft. And it is the data from all the open source code on Github that Microsoft used to help OpenAI build GPT-Codex, the code-focused variant of their GPT solutions.

But they took it a step further by integrating GPT-Codex with Visual Studio to create GitHub Copilot. It's a strong push by Microsoft to further establish Visual Studio & Visual Studio Code as the dominant software development environment in the enterprise space, pushing out old competitors like Eclipse or IntelliJ.

AI-assisted coding

Why Github Copilot? Because Github Copilot integrates with your code base. It looks and feels just like ChatGPT. But it does so while knowing what your other code looks like. Even as you type, it can pre-populate and autofill your code. There's no need to copy and paste from ChatGPT.

It can even design an entire workspace from scratch based on your requirements.

Having used it a lot over the past year, it has been a blessing, and in fact I loathe coding without Github Copilot by my side these days. It forces me to write better comments. By using clearer language to describe my intentions, my code is better documented than ever before.

Conclusion

In the future, I expect Microsoft to dominate the programming IDE market and the CAD solution market by giving their customers an incredible advantage that borders on fraud. And they do that by empowering their own people first.

This is why I call Satya Nadella a genius strategist.
This is why they have cornered the market.

This is why Microsoft may very well become the first megacorporation of the cyberpunk age we are about to enter.