As part of its efforts to modernise the office software suite, Microsoft is apparently in talks to add OpenAI’s AI writer ChatGPT to Microsoft Office.

Another effort to introduce AI tools that employ OpenAI’s machine-learned language models into Office to produce emails and documents failed, so now developers are planning to add ChatGPT’s text-generation capabilities to “Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other applications.”

The future of Microsoft, ChatGPT, and the present

It has been reported by insiders that Microsoft plans to use ChatGPT so as to “offer more meaningful search results when Outlook email clients hunt for content in their inboxes.”

Example: “GPT can predict which emails the user is looking for, even if they don’t enter the specific keywords that are in the relevant emails.”

Moving ahead, Microsoft is likely to want ChatGPT to perform things like respond to emails, revise papers for clarity, and generate whole pages based on user prompts, all in the same way that it does now.

Due to its sudden surge to fame, ChatGPT has inspired widespread panic as people wonder what it is capable of doing. However, there is currently no evidence to suggest that it is even close to being fully developed.

Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, acknowledges that ChatGPT is unstable (opens in new tab) and at best a proof-of-concept at this time, which has Google executives worried about its accuracy and educators fearful that it would disrupt an already damaged system.

Microsoft may have ambitious intentions for ChatGPT and other products powered by OpenAI’s GPT language model, but at this time, there is no concrete timeline for when these ideas will be implemented.

Warnings that ChatGPT “may sometimes produce inaccurate information,” “damaging instructions or biassed material,” and the like are included for a purpose; it is now labelled as a “free research preview.” Not quite there yet.

Perhaps we would all be better served by focusing on other things until ChatGPT has matured to the point where it can not only impress us, but also be readily applicable to different aspects of our lives, rather than chasing the tails of insiders and how companies may or may not end up leveraging nascent technology.