Microsoft shivs OpenAI with three new AI models for speech and images

Microsoft on Thursday unveiled public preview versions of three home-baked machine learning models focused on speech recognition, speech synthesis, and image generation. The release makes the Windows biz look more like a direct competitor to OpenAI than an investor – Redmond held an OpenAI stake valued at about $135 billion as …

[sarusa]

Three new steaming piles

But it's Microslop, they'll all be worst in class.

Then again, lots of consumers who prefer terrible but free since their standards are as low as Microslop's.

[NoneSuch]

Never partner with Microsoft.

If the product is good, they build their own and screw you.

If the product is mediocre, they build their own and screw you.

[cyberdemon]

And they apparently don't care if they screw themselves and their investors in the process..

Just look at the Nokia fiasco: They screwed them with a Trojan horse, then bought the remains, all to push Windows Phone and Surface RT, which were their worst products since er, Zune.

MS are not just anticompetitive, they are enshittifying the entire economy. They have swallowed the poisoned Kool-Aid and will soon go the way of Oracle. Literally nobody benefits except a handful of villains in the short term. Perhaps they are in their 90s and don't care.

I would use the gates_horns icon but I can't be bothered to edit the post form

[Sandtitz]

"And they apparently don't care if they screw themselves and their investors in the process.."

So ElReg AI phobes are suddenly worried about what happens to OpenAI and poor Sam Altman?!

Maybe MS has seen the writing on the wall? This article states they have developed better LLM models than what OpenAI has to offer. It would be foolish to rely on a single horse that seems to be limping when there's a lot of very able competition with similarly unlimited resources, some of them ahead already. Same thing with Nokia - Microsoft should have but a bullet in the WinPhone earlier when it was obvious to everyone that the race was lost, but they kept flogging the dead horse.

"Just look at the Nokia fiasco: They screwed them with a Trojan horse, then bought the remains, all to push Windows Phone and Surface RT, which were their worst products since er, Zune."

Stephen Elop goes down as bumbling idiot in the history books, no doubt. I'm sure the Canadians are proud of their boy.

Nokia had started their implosion much earlier with their disastrous leadership and this has been well documented by now. They could have moved to Android phones - which has worked very well with Samsung - but they would have just been one of many other clone manufacturers then and probably still screwed themselves because of a certain "not-invented-here" air of superiority.

Windows Phone was fine, the UI was great. It just came out too late and didn't have a good enough software ecosystem to survive. I'm sure you've never used one anyway.

[Jimjam3]

Same old Microslop. Embrace, extend extinguish.

As for Windows phone, I had one as well as a Surface RT and both had hardware that was underpowered for the OS that ran on it.

[Hairy Moose]

Beg to disgree

“Windows phone was fine” - as long as you didn’t want to, erm, answer the phone. Ringing, while in any other app, caused the snails powering the device to freeze, and by the time the device could be bothered to show the ‘answer call’ widget, the caller had left a voicemail, popped down to the pub, written a three page missive, and had that sent by slow rickshaw.

[cd]

Like Amazon Basics, then.

[IGotOut]

Without Microslop, OpenAI probably would've died long ago. They gave them massive discounts on compute and storage, "invested" huge amounts of cash and if you read into it, they pretty much own much of the IP anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gemma 4 just came out literally today with full audiovisual processing on the edge, so even if you like AI, there's a lot more interesting stuff going on outside of Microsoft (as usual)

[sarusa]

Microslop is doing everything with vibe coding now (Nadella bragged about it) so of course they can only produce derivative steaming piles.

[QET]

Not gonna be surprised if MicroSlop is using its old "embrace, extend, extinguish" regarding OpenAI.

Claim to be its buddy, while backstabbing them, so when bankruptcy happens, MS can buy the sorry leftovers dirt cheap.

[ecofeco]

Uh oh

This is not a good sign.

[munnoch]

Enterprise-grade speech recognition?

So it totally ignores whatever you say and carries on doing what it was already doing?

[breakfast]

Re: Enterprise-grade speech recognition?

It only responds when you start your statement with "Computer" and one can't help but notice that the only thing anyone trusts it to actually do is open and close the doors.

[Anonymous Coward]

“Enterprise-grade accuracy” is meaningless gibberish even by Micro$lop standards. I laughed out loud.