According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI has become “awkward” due to tension and confusion. Ars Technica reports: Not only has this tension and confusion extended to Microsoft’s internal AI team — which apparently is dealing with budget cuts and limited access to OpenAI technology — but sources said it also clouded Microsoft’s controversial rollout of AI-powered Bing search last February. At that time, Bing was found to be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks revealing company secrets and providing sometimes inaccurate and truly unhinged responses to user prompts. According to WSJ, OpenAI warned Microsoft “about the perils of rushing to integrate OpenAI’s technology without training it more” and “suggested Microsoft move slower on integrating its AI technology with Bing.” A top concern for OpenAI was that Bing’s chatbot, Sydney, might give inaccurate or unhinged responses, but this early warning seemingly was easily ignored by Microsoft. In a Wired interview published today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested that any hiccups with Sydney at first were just part of Microsoft’s plan for training the chatbot to respond to real-world prompts that couldn’t be tested in a lab. “We did not launch Sydney with GPT-4 the first day I saw it, because we had to do a lot of work to build a safety harness,” Nadella told Wired. “But we also knew we couldn’t do all the alignment in the lab. To align an AI model with the world, you have to align it in the world and not in some simulation.”

So that’s partly why Microsoft rushed ahead anyway, but sources told WSJ that the rush was also partly due to Microsoft executives who had “misgivings about the timing of ChatGPT’s launch last fall.” Because OpenAI started ChatGPT’s public testing while Microsoft was still working on integrating OpenAI tech into Bing, tension seemingly spiked between the partners, who also stood as rivals in an AI race to capture the world’s attention. As ChatGPT’s success grew, some Microsoft employees raised concerns that ChatGPT was stealing Bing’s “thunder,” WSJ reported. Others sensibly posited that Microsoft could learn valuable lessons ahead of Bing’s rollout from ChatGPT’s early public testing. […] Of course, ChatGPT ultimately won the AI race, instantly attracting the fastest-growing user base in history. Meanwhile, “the new Bing,” released a month later, “has yet to come close to the breakout success of ChatGPT,” WSJ reported. Citing data from analytics firm YipitData, WSJ reported that ChatGPT “has nearly double the average number of daily search sessions as Bing search does.”

Further tension and confusion has brewed within Microsoft’s in-house AI team, which has “complained about diminished spending.” Most employees are set back by a lack of “access to the inner workings” of OpenAI’s technology, which is particularly painful for employees attempting to integrate that tech into various Microsoft products. There’s also the awkward reality that OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s sales teams “sometimes pitch the same customers.” Much of this “drama” amounts to typical infighting that happens any time two companies pair up, WSJ reported, but there’s no ignoring the conflict inherent to both sides attempting to maintain independence while reaping maximum profits by selling access to the same technology. Despite these tensions, Nadella told Wired that OpenAI “bet on” Microsoft, and Microsoft “bet on” OpenAI. He still envisions “a good commercial partnership” between the independent companies and considered Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI as “a long-term stable deal.” Increasingly, it looks like one way to assuage tension is to bring the companies even closer together in partnership. WSJ noted that Nadella announced last month that the Bing search engine would soon be integrated into ChatGPT, which he said was “just the start of what we plan to do with our partners in OpenAI to bring the best of Bing to the ChatGPT experience.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.