Microsoft to Introduce ChatGPT Business Version with Enhanced Privacy
Microsoft is set to launch a standalone version of ChatGPT to address the privacy concerns of its enterprise customers. The company plans to introduce ChatGPT on dedicated servers before the end of the present quarter. These servers will be independent per company, thus preventing data exchange between different AI models and avoiding external data leakage.
The move to enhance privacy comes at a cost, with reports suggesting that the private ChatGPT variants could cost up to ten times the price of the standard version. However, the exact figures have not been disclosed, and it is not clear whether the cost estimates refer to OpenAI’s $20 ChatGPT access or the commercial use of ChatGPT in Microsoft’s business ecosystem.
OpenAI has also announced a similar product with the business version of ChatGPT, although the details of the offering are still unknown. By default, data entered by employees in ChatGPT will no longer be used for optimizing AI models. OpenAI is expected to release further information about ChatGPT for business in the coming weeks.
Microsoft and OpenAI, despite their extensive collaboration, are now competing for the same customers. Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI at the end of January, and both companies are likely to collaborate on AI training on Microsoft servers. Microsoft is also set to implement OpenAI technology in several Microsoft products, including Bing Chat.
The new business offerings from Microsoft and OpenAI are a direct response to growing concerns regarding the non-transparent use of data to train and run large-scale AI models. In light of this, Samsung has recently banned the internal use of ChatGPT and similar AI services, opting to develop its own AI models instead. However, an independently operated ChatGPT might be a more attractive proposition than a completely in-house AI model, given the time-consuming, costly, and error-prone nature of pre-training the model that forms the basis of its language capabilities.
