Every so often an article comes along that explains damn near everything. This New Yorker longread – detailing Microsoft’s involvement in AI, and its intersection with the recent chaos at OpenAI – is exactly one of those. The insight into Microsoft’s meticulous strategy toward ‘demystifying’ AI and making it prosaic is, by itself, worth the read:

The upgraded Bing was just a preview of Microsoft’s agenda. Some of the company’s software commands up to seventy per cent of its respective market. Microsoft decided that the development of safeguards for Office Copilots could follow the formula it had already worked out: the public could be enlisted as a testing partner. Whenever a Copilot responded to a user’s question, the system could ask the user to look at two A.I. replies and pick one as superior. Copilot interfaces could present users with sample prompts to teach them how best to query the system (“Summarize this memo in three sentences”) and to demonstrate capabilities they may not have known about (“Which job application has the fewest grammatical errors?”). Before each Office Copilot was released, it would be customized for its particular mandate: the Excel Copilot, for example, was fed long lists of common spreadsheet mistakes. Each A.I. has a “temperature”—a setting that controls the system’s randomness and, thus, its creativity—and Excel’s was ratcheted way down. The Excel Copilot was designed to remember a user’s previous queries and results, allowing it to anticipate the user’s needs. The Copilot was designed so that people could draw on the computer language Python to automate Excel’s functions by making simple, plain-language requests.

The whole thing is incredible, and highly recommended. Read it here.