Microsoft Copilot+ vs. OpenAI's GPT-4o: The AI Race

TL;DR

Microsoft is launching AI-powered PCs with a controversial 'Recall' feature that screenshots everything, while OpenAI's new voice AI is so human it sparked a celebrity legal battle. The future of productivity is here, and it's complicated. #VentureStep #AI #Tech

INTRODUCTION

The battle for AI supremacy is heating up, with tech giants racing to integrate artificial intelligence directly into the hardware and software we use every day. Microsoft and its partner OpenAI are at the forefront of this charge, launching new products that promise to revolutionize productivity but also raise significant questions about privacy and ethics. This new frontier is forcing consumers and creators to grapple with how much of our digital lives we are willing to hand over for the sake of convenience.

In this episode of Venture Step, host Dalton dives deep into two of the biggest recent announcements in the AI space. 1First, he breaks down Microsoft's new line of "Copilot+ PCs," exploring the powerful hardware designed to run AI tasks locally and dissecting its most talked-about and controversial feature, Recall. 22He explains the complex history between Microsoft and OpenAI that led to this moment and pits the new machines directly against their biggest competitor, the Apple MacBook Air. 33

The conversation then shifts to a live demonstration of OpenAI's new flagship model, GPT-4o, showcasing its stunningly realistic conversational abilities and real-time translation features. ⁴⁴Dalton also explores the ethical firestorm surrounding the AI's voice, the controversy with actress Scarlett Johansson, and how these advancements mirror dystopian concepts from shows like

Black Mirror, pushing us to question where this technology is headed. ⁵⁵

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Microsoft's new Copilot+ PCs are built with specialized AI chips designed to run 40 trillion operations per second, claiming to be 58% faster than Apple's M3-powered MacBook Air. ⁶⁶⁶
• The exclusive "Recall" feature on Copilot+ PCs creates a searchable photographic memory of your activity by taking a screenshot every five seconds, raising major privacy concerns that it functions like malware. ⁷⁷⁷⁷⁷
• OpenAI’s GPT-4o model introduces a new era of conversational AI, capable of real-time voice translation and performing complex research tasks through natural dialogue. ⁸⁸
• The launch of GPT-4o was mired in controversy after OpenAI used a voice strikingly similar to Scarlett Johansson's, despite her twice refusing to partner with them, highlighting serious ethical issues in AI development. ⁹⁹⁹⁹⁹
• The tech industry is in a full-blown AI arms race between Microsoft, Google, and Apple, with Microsoft leveraging its OpenAI partnership to integrate AI deeply into its Windows ecosystem to gain a competitive edge. ¹⁰

FULL CONVERSATION

Dalton: Welcome to Venture Step podcast where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. ¹¹Get ready to level up your productivity and potentially touch up on your Spanish. ¹²Today we're going to be discussing Microsoft's recent announcement of their Copilot+ PCs and what that is. ¹³And we will be doing a live demo of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o, the conversation feature. ¹⁴I've showed that with a couple of family members and they've kind of freaked out a little bit. ¹⁵ It's an eye-opening experience. But before we dive in, my name's Dalton. ¹⁶My background is a bit of a mix of programming, data science and insurance. ¹⁷Offline, you can find me running, building my side business or lost in a good book. ¹⁸You can listen to the podcast in video and audio format on YouTube. ¹⁹If audio is more your thing, you can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. ²⁰

The Microsoft-OpenAI Partnership Explained

Dalton: As stated, we're going to be discussing Microsoft's Copilot announcement and their Copilot+ PCs and what that means. ²¹And then we'll be talking about OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.0 with the conversation feature. ²²Before we get too sidetracked, let's discuss Microsoft's Copilot announcement and first let's backtrack and just talk about what is Copilot and how is it related to OpenAI. ²³

Dalton: It's a long thread of information, but I'm going to try to summarize it. ²⁴Basically, when OpenAI was founded, it was open and was a nonprofit. ²⁵It was backed by people like Elon Musk and other founders of large technology companies that felt that AI is going to be the future, but they wanted it to be managed by the right group. ²⁶The board of directors that was put together was a group of individuals highly concerned about AI, and they wanted to develop it carefully. ²⁷That didn't necessarily bode well with Sam Altman, who's in charge of OpenAI. ²⁸

Dalton: They had arguments and the board fired Sam. ²⁹He was devastated and was going to start his own thing. ³⁰Then Microsoft came in and was like, "Hey, how do you feel about just coming to Microsoft?" ³¹Sam was like, "Alright, fine." ³²Then he told some people at OpenAI, and pretty much the majority of the company signed an agreement that when Sam left to Microsoft, they were going to leave to Microsoft. ³³I think it was like 90% of the company was down to just leave. ³⁴Basically, OpenAI would just shift over for free to Microsoft. ³⁵That had a chain reaction because all of the IP that OpenAI has created is just garbage now because they're not going to be able to get back all of that knowledge. ³⁶

Dalton: So basically it would just destroy the company, and the board was like, "Okay, hold on guys, let's talk about it." ³⁷The solution was they rehired Sam as the CEO of OpenAI. ³⁸The employees agreed to stay. ³⁹They had a signed document of everyone that was going to leave when Sam left. ⁴⁰It wasn't informal; it was very formal. ⁴¹The agreement that the board had is they're going to hire back Sam, the employees are going to stay, and Microsoft is going to partner with OpenAI. ⁴²Once that partnership happened, Microsoft partnered with OpenAI and created Microsoft Copilot. ⁴³

Microsoft Copilot is pretty much ChatGPT three or four. I think if you pay for the pro, you get four. And in their recent announcement, they said coming soon will be ChatGPT-4o capabilities in Microsoft Copilot. ⁴⁴

Dalton: So now you have a good framework of what is going on between OpenAI and Microsoft. ⁴⁵The feature set between Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI are pretty much identical because Microsoft is just rebranding OpenAI's product as Microsoft Copilot. ⁴⁶

What Are Microsoft Copilot+ PCs?

Dalton: Okay, now that is all out of the way. What are Microsoft Copilot+ PCs? ⁴⁷Microsoft's new Surface PC and new line of Windows PCs is going to be integrated with a new chip. ⁴⁸This chip is going to handle the math that's required for these AI models to run. ⁴⁹So they have this new chip, I think they call it the NPC. ⁵⁰Google has the Tensor chip, TPUs. ⁵¹ They've got their own little name. You just got to know they have an AI chip in the computer. ⁵²

Performance and Specs: Faster Than a MacBook Air?

Dalton: What is important is that this chip, with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, is gonna run 58% faster than the M3 powered MacBook Airs. ⁵³We haven't been able to independently back up this claim, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't state that unless they were quite certain. ⁵⁴The new chip is gonna be able to handle 40 trillion operations per second to handle these AI processes. ⁵⁵What they demoed is the chip would be able to handle multiple concurrent operations at once without that affecting performance and efficiency. ⁵⁶

Dalton: When I say performance, your computer is not going to lag. ⁵⁷When I say efficiency, your computer isn't going to overheat and lose battery power faster than normal. ⁵⁸ They said that their AI chip is not gonna take up that much power. It's very efficient, which is great. ⁵⁹They also said that it's gonna have up to 30 hours of battery life and 26 hours of video playback. ⁶⁰They compared it actively with a MacBook Air and it won by quite a bit. ⁶¹They had their previous Surface, the new Surface, and the MacBook Air M3. ⁶²It's an internal demo, but yes, Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs won. ⁶³

The Controversial 'Recall' Feature: A Feature or Malware?

Dalton: So what are some weird things that they showed? ⁶⁴One of the capabilities, which kind of resembles malware, is a feature exclusive to Copilot+ PCs called Recall. ⁶⁵Recall basically caches information on your screen, and then later on you can ask Copilot, "Hey, can you pull up that email from Sandra on Wednesday?" ⁶⁶Copilot will be able to know where that email is because it can go into its memory. ⁶⁷To do that, it's basically taking a screenshot every five seconds of your screen. ⁶⁸

It's basically malware on your system, but it's used as a feature because that's what a malware would do. It would record all your keystrokes or it would record your screen constantly and take a lot of screenshots to be able to see personal information from you. ⁶⁹

Dalton: This is using the same thing but reversing it into a benefit to you, where you can pull up things like "Can you pull up Jack's photos that we took as a family? ⁷⁰The ones he's smiling in," and it should be able to find it. ⁷¹

Privacy Concerns and Potential Risks of Recall

Dalton: I don't think people are gonna be cool with it right away. ⁷²I think it's gonna be one of those things where you're having a really hard time recalling something from four months ago, and you could have just had Microsoft Recall enabled. ⁷³⁷³⁷³Those are the points where people will be open to having their screen constantly monitored. ⁷⁴I don't think right away people are going to be very receptive to this. ⁷⁵A lot of people didn't like it on the internet. ⁷⁶

And rightfully so. Like how do you know for sure that no one else has access to it? How do you know that it's only on device? How do you prevent bad actors from getting access to this? ⁷⁷

Dalton: It's encrypted, but I don't know how strong the encryption is. ⁷⁸If you got access to that, you would basically have all of a person's digital footprint for the lifetime that they had their computer. ⁷⁹I didn't hear anything about them wiping the cache constantly. ⁸⁰But even a year's information of a screenshot every five seconds, that's everything. ⁸¹There are no missing gaps there. ⁸²It's kind of scary. ⁸³

AI Photo Editing and Pricing Comparison

Dalton: They had some other cool features that are similar to Google Photos where they'll edit photos for you, remove the background, make it black and white, or maybe unblur it all on your device, which is nice. ⁸⁴That's something that Google's had for a while. ⁸⁵I don't know how relevant it is because a lot of people are not storing their photos in OneDrive; they'll store it in iCloud or Google Photos. ⁸⁶

Dalton: Regarding pricing, it's pretty much going to be the same price as a MacBook Air. ⁸⁷The starting price of the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 with the Snapdragon X Elite chip starts at $1,249, which is comparable to the price of the 13-inch MacBook Air M3. ⁸⁸So it's a direct competitor. ⁸⁹

The AI Arms Race: Where Does Apple Fit In?

Dalton: Apple at the moment doesn't have any AI features. ⁹⁰It seemed like they were going to partner with OpenAI at one point. ⁹¹I think Sam met with Tim Cook. ⁹²Maybe Apple goes the Google route. ⁹³I know that Google pays them an exorbitant amount of money not to make a search browser. ⁹⁴They're paying them billions a year. ⁹⁵I think Google and Apple could get together on something because Microsoft has OpenAI. ⁹⁶

Not only are our computers faster right now, but they also have all these AI features that come with it. And so we have an offering where computers aren't as expensive, and then we have this elite offering that competes directly with Apple, which has been killing us with their silicon chips. ⁹⁷

Dalton: Microsoft Copilot+ PCs that are faster than M3 chips, have more battery life, and the same price. ⁹⁸And it has AI stuff. ⁹⁹Over time, it's going to be something that you use every day. ¹⁰⁰

Live Demo: Exploring OpenAI's GPT-4o

Dalton: Let's move over to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o. ¹⁰¹The O stands for Omni and Omni stands for multichannel. ¹⁰²It's basically saying this is the model that is multimodal and can handle text, voice, photos, whatever you throw at me. ¹⁰³Okay, so if you're listening and not viewing the video, I have ChatGPT on a different screen and we have the app open and we're gonna engage in a conversation. ¹⁰⁴

Testing Live Translation: English to Spanish

Dalton: Hey, we're in a live demo for a podcast episode and we just want to demo some of your features. ¹⁰⁵One thing that we'd like to see is live translation from English to Spanish, starting now. ¹⁰⁶

Dalton: I don't know whether or not I'm going to go to the mall today because I don't know if my friends are available. ¹⁰⁷They might be working. ¹⁰⁸

(AI Voice translates to Spanish)

Dalton: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Things are more fun when your friends are available. 109

(AI Voice translates to Spanish)

Putting GPT-4o to Work: Cold Emailing Strategies

Dalton: Okay, let's move on to something else. ¹¹⁰Can we talk about how we should go about sending emails as a cold call for podcast guests? ¹¹¹

(AI Voice explains strategy)

Dalton: Explain why you think they'd be a good fit, what you'd like to discuss, and make it easy for them to respond. ¹¹²

(AI asks: "Would you like a sample email draft?")

Dalton: Yes, please. Thank you. 113

(AI generates email draft)

Dalton: Can you research a hundred Insurtech companies and give me their websites so I can research whether I want to send a cold email to them, requesting them to be a podcast guest? ¹¹⁴

(AI generates a list of companies)

Dalton: The live demo is ending now, but I really appreciate all the work that you did. ¹¹⁵

The Scarlett Johansson Controversy and AI Ethics

Dalton: So that was the interactive feature. There was a controversial issue with the original demoed female voice. ¹¹⁶It sounded like Scarlett Johansson, and Scarlett Johansson was part of this movie called

Her. ¹¹⁷Sam Altman, before the demo, tweeted "her." ¹¹⁸And in the demo, people were asking if this was a collaboration with Scarlett Johansson because it really sounds like her from the movie. ¹¹⁹

Dalton: Apparently, Sam had reached out to have Scarlett Johansson partner with OpenAI to be the voice actor. ¹²⁰He was requesting approval to use her voice, and she said no. ¹²¹She strongly denied it, apparently. ¹²²Sam reached out again a month or two before the event and asked if she could reconsider. ¹²³She then said no, again. ¹²⁴During the demo, her friends were texting her saying, "Hey, did you do that stuff with OpenAI? ¹²⁵It sounds like it's you." ¹²⁶So she listens to the demo and she was all upset, and she made a legal statement from her lawyers. ¹²⁷OpenAI pulled that voice type. ¹²⁸

The whole thing is just controversial because it seemed like they used her voice, even though they said they didn't use her voice, to train this voice type... without her permission and with her explicitly saying no. ¹²⁹

AI, Black Mirror, and the Future of Personal Likeness

Dalton: It kind of reminds me of an episode in the show called Black Mirror. ¹³⁰It's in season one and the episode is about this person who is watching Streamberry, which is the shell company of Netflix in this show. ¹³¹In their terms and conditions, they force users to opt into this reality TV show of themselves, and they do it in a bad light. ¹³²They use your likeness without your permission. ¹³³

Dalton: It was similar with TikTok. ¹³⁴TikTok was using popular actors' voices to make these voiceovers. ¹³⁵They didn't have permission. ¹³⁶There's nothing stopping someone from taking information that's on the internet, downloading the audio, and then training AI to become a little version of you. ¹³⁷

The Absurdity of AI Dating Concierges

Dalton: It's similar to a Black Mirror episode where they have AI agents acting on your behalf for dating. ¹³⁸Bumble is talking about something called AI Concierge. ¹³⁹Your AI is supposed to date hundreds of other AIs that are a profile of you and an imitation of yourself, and it's supposed to find your best match without you being involved in all the small talk. ¹⁴⁰

That in itself just seems like a crazy absurd concept and I hope that AI doesn't go that direction. I don't think that's the right one. If we take any direction, I know for a fact that's probably not the direction that we want to take. ¹⁴¹

Dalton: I think people will rightfully push back on that Recall feature. ¹⁴²I think people pushed back on the Bumble AI concierge. ¹⁴³People were like, "Wait, hold on. This is literally a Black Mirror episode about this, and it didn't turn out very well. Why are you suggesting this feature?" ¹⁴⁴

Dalton: So we talked about OpenAI and their conversation feature where we got to talk about podcast cold emails. ¹⁴⁵It looked up some companies for me and gave me their website. ¹⁴⁶And we talked about live translation, which is pretty nuts. ¹⁴⁷Duolingo's stock was crushed by this. ¹⁴⁸Then we talked about Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs and the Microsoft and OpenAI partnership. ¹⁴⁹What did you think about the recent computer announcement? ¹⁵⁰What are your thoughts about the episode? ¹⁵¹If you have any opinions, of course, leave them on the YouTube channel comments or on Facebook or Instagram. ¹⁵²You'll find me if you just type in Venture Step. ¹⁵³

Dalton: I appreciate everyone coming in today. Thank you for listening and see you some other time next week. 154 Have a great day, night, or morning, wherever you are in this world. Bye. 155

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Microsoft Copilot+ PCs
• OpenAI / ChatGPT-4o
• Apple MacBook Air M3
• Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip
• Google Photos
• Google Translate
• Apple iCloud
• Microsoft OneDrive
• The movie Her
• The show Black Mirror
• Bumble (AI Concierge)
• Duolingo
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Facebook
• Instagram

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

Dalton, Microsoft, Copilot, Copilot Plus PCs, OpenAI, ChatGPT, ChatGPT-4o, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Ryan Reynolds, Apple, Google, Surface PC, Windows, NPC chip, TPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, M3 chip, MacBook Air, Recall feature, OneDrive, iCloud, Google Photos, Safari, Chrome, Her (movie), Black Mirror (show), Streamberry, Bumble, AI Concierge, Duolingo, TikTok, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram