Former Wall Street Journal journalist Tom Dotan reported in the Newcomer newsletter that Microsoft Copilot has approximately 20 million weekly active users, far behind OpenAI with 400 million weekly users or even Gemini with 350 million users per month (measurement units may vary).
Dotan stated that this information was sourced from slides presented by Amy Hood, Microsoft’s CFO, internally showcasing the growth of Copilot compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Microsoft is attempting to address this issue by recruiting Mustafa Suleyman, former co-founder of DeepMind, as the Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft AI in March 2024. However, despite Suleyman being in the position for over a year, the desired results have not been achieved.
Suleyman’s arrival, along with his team from Inflection AI, has impacted Microsoft’s existing AI team. Microsoft’s main goal is to develop their own large language model, LLM, to reduce reliance on OpenAI’s models. It is rumored that Microsoft previously developed a model called MAI-1 led by Karén Simonyan, who also joined from Inflection.
However, Simonyan’s team must collaborate with Sebastien Bubeck’s small model team, Phi, which has encountered challenges. The integration of Phi’s model training with synthetic data worked well for the small model individually, but when combined to develop the larger MAI-1 model with real and synthetic data, the results were not satisfactory. Debate arose, attributing the poor results to Bubeck’s synthetic data. Ultimately, Bubeck left for OpenAI, and the Phi team was relocated back to Microsoft Research.
The relationship between Suleyman’s team and OpenAI is also strained, as evidenced by the development of OpenAI’s o3 model last year, which Suleyman’s team could not access before others, leading to conflict between the two organizations.
Although Suleyman unveiled new features of Copilot at Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration, the overall AI landscape at Microsoft has not significantly improved. It remains a critical challenge for Suleyman to determine if he can turn the game around for Microsoft to regain its leadership in the AI sector.
Source: Newcomer
TLDR: Microsoft Copilot’s user base trails behind competitors like OpenAI, despite efforts to boost growth with the recruitment of industry experts and the development of proprietary models. Challenges persist in integrating different AI teams and achieving desired results, raising questions about Microsoft’s AI strategy under Suleyman’s leadership.
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