Microsoft is sprinkling OpenAI everywhere to try and keep software makers interested in its platforms
Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella speaks to attendees at Microsoft’s Build conference in Seattle on May 23, 2023.
Dan DeLong | Microsoft
If there’s one company that has popularized artificial intelligence in the past year, it’s the small but richly funded startup OpenAI, the entity behind viral chatbot ChatGPT.
This week at its Build conference for software developers, Microsoft made extensive use of its collaboration with the startup, in which it’s invested billions.
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Front and center on Tuesday, the first day of the show, was a onstage conversation between Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and president, and Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s technology chief and the person credited with building the unusually close relationship between the two companies.
“You heard it from Greg,” Scott told the crowd assembled at the Seattle Convention Center near the end of the talk. “You all are the ones who are going to make AI great.”
Toward that end, Microsoft announced a slew of products for developers that draw on OpenAI’s technology:
- There are new Azure cloud tools for customized text summarization.
- A forthcoming chatbot promises to help developers work with data and prepare it for analysis.
- Developers will be able to build plug-ins that work inside of ChatGPT and the chatbots inside Microsoft’s own products, including one that will debut in Windows next month.
- Developers who receive coding suggestions through the GitHub Copilot feature will gain access to a chatbot inside of the Windows Terminal command-line program.
Generative AI will change software forever, says Nadella
OpenAI released ChatGPT to the broad world in November, sparking lots of interest from consumers. Shortly thereafter, companies such as Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and Salesforce rushed to show off integrations of OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, which powers the chatbot. GPT-4 and alternatives from the likes of Amazon and Google have been trained on extensive internet data sets and have become capable of spitting out chunks of natural-sounding text.
The technology is a popular form of what has come to be called generative AI, which can take human input and respond with a computer-generated output.
“Every layer of the software stack is going to be changed forever and no better place to start than the actual developer stack,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during his Build keynote address on Tuesday. “We as developers, how do we build is fundamentally changing.”
It’s crucial for third-party developers to enrich Microsoft’s own software properties, such as the Microsoft 365 productivity software bundle. Such work might help Microsoft’s Teams communication app, for example, to become a more obvious hub for an increasingly wide selection of processes and tasks that companies need to carry out. That can make companies less likely to switch to alternatives such as Google Workspace.
Microsoft highlighted dozens of plug-in developers on Tuesday, including Adobe, Asana, Canva, Cloudflare, Redfin, Spotify and TripAdvisor. A demonstration showed the Windows chatbot turning on a Spotify playlist, creating a company logo with Adobe Express and sending the logo to a person’s colleagues over Teams in response to a series of typed messages.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI president and co-founder, and Kevin Scott, Microsoft chief technology officer, speak onstage at Microsoft’s Build conference in Seattle on May 23, 2023.
Dan DeLong | Microsoft
At the same time, Nadella has pushed for Microsoft to incorporate GPT-4 directly into Teams and older Microsoft products, such as the Bing search engine, often resulting in bots branded with the name Copilot. The Copilot term emphasizes collaboration with people, in contrast with (for example) the Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system for Tesla vehicles.
“We are adding Copilot into everything,” Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and AI group, told CNBC in an interview last week. “It’s less of a top-down mandate, although we’re certainly pushing top-down. I think it’s something where we’ve actually evangelized internally and really got every team excited about. And we are building a common stack across Microsoft that the entire company is building on top of.”
Analysts responded favorably to the developer onslaught.
“The pace of MSFT’s GenAI innovation remains stunning to us,” Mizuho analysts with a buy rating on Microsoft stock wrote in a Wednesday note to clients.
Brockman hinted to developers that the cost of GPT-4, which runs in Azure, could come down.
“I think we did a 70% price reduction two years ago,” he told Scott. “Basically, this past year, we did a 90% cost reduction. A 10 times cost drop — like, that’s crazy, right? And I think we’re going to be able to do the same thing repeatedly with new models. And so GPT-4 right now, it’s expensive, it’s not fully available. But that’s one of the things that I think will change.”
WATCH: Microsoft Build 2023 unveils plugins and products that incorporate A.I.
Omar Marques | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Ether ETFs have finally come to life this year after some started to fear they may be becoming zombie funds.
Collectively, the funds tracking the price of spot ether are on pace for their sixth consecutive week of inflows and eight positive week in the last nine, according to SoSoValue.
The second largest cryptocurrency has become more attractive to institutions in recent weeks largely due to recent regulatory momentum in the U.S. around stablecoins – many of which run on the Ethereum network – the successful IPO of Circle, the issuer of the second-largest stablecoin; and new leadership at the Ethereum Foundation.
“What we’re seeing is institutional recalibration,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto charting and research platform DYOR. “After the initial ETH ETF approval fizzled without a price pop, smart money started quietly building positions. They’re betting not on price momentum but on positioning ahead of utility unlocks like staking access, options listings, and eventually inflows from retirement platforms.”
The first year of ether ETFs, which launched in July 2024, has been characterized by weak demand. While the funds have had spikes in inflows, they’ve trailed far behind bitcoin ETFs in both inflows and investor attention – amassing about $3.9 billion in net inflows since listing versus bitcoin ETFs’ $36 billion in their first year of trading.
“With increasing acceptance of crypto on Wall Street, especially now as a means for payments and remittances, investors are being drawn to ETH ETFs,” said Chris Rhine, head of liquid active strategies at Galaxy Digital.
Additionally, he added, the CME basis on ether – or the price difference between ether futures and the spot price – is higher than that of bitcoin, giving arbitrageurs an opportunity to profit by going long on ether ETFs while shorting futures (a common trading strategy) and contributing to the uptrend in ether ETF inflows.
Ether (ETH) 1 month
Despite the uptrend in inflows, the price of ether itself is negative for this month and flat over the past month.
For the year, it’s down 25% as it’s been suffering from an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about Ethereum’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year has not helped.
In March, Standard Chartered slashed its ether price target by more than half. However, the firm also said the coin could still see a turnaround this year.
Since last week’s big spike in inflows, they’ve “slowed but stayed net positive, suggesting conviction, not hype,” Kurland said. “The market looks like a heart monitor, but the buyers are treating it like a long-term infrastructure bet.”
A motorcycle is seen near a building of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company, in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on April 16, 2025.
Daniel Ceng | Anadolu | Getty Images
Semiconductor stocks declined Friday following a report that the U.S. is weighing measures that would terminate waivers allowing some chipmakers to send American technology to China.
Commerce Department official Jeffrey Kessler told Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Taiwan Semiconductor this week that he wanted to cancel their waivers, which allow them to send U.S. chipmaking tech to their factories in China, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The VanEck Semiconductor ETF declined about 1%. Nvidia, Qualcomm and Marvell Technology fell about 1%, while Taiwan Semiconductor slipped about 2%.
The latest reported move by the Commerce Department comes as the U.S. and China hold an unsteady truce over tariffs and trade, with chip controls a key sticking point.
The countries agreed to the framework of a second trade agreement in London days ago after relations soured following the initial tariff pause in May.
The U.S. issued several chip export changes after the May pause that rattled relations, with China calling the rules “discriminatory.”
U.S. chipmakers have been hit with curbs over the last few years, limiting the ability to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to China due to national security concerns.
During its earnings report last month, Nvidia said the recent export restriction on its China-bound H20 chips hindered sales by about $8 billion.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on an earnings call that the $50 billion market in China for AI chips is “effectively closed to U.S. industry.” During a CNBC interview in May, he called getting blocked from China’s AI market a “tremendous loss.”
Read the full WSJ report here.
WATCH: U.S. prepares action targeting allies’ ability to ship American chip-making equipment to China
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