Remember when a “googly-eyed, caterpillar-browed” creature hovered around your screen, asking incessantly if you needed help navigating the Office 365 suite? Yes, that annoying and intrusive avatar which grated on our nerves. ‘Clippy’, the virtual assistant, which has left its mark in today’s pop culture (appearing in many sitcom gags), might be making a comeback soon, although with a twist.   

With the ongoing brouhaha over the ChatGPT, we can expect Clippy to make a comeback in the form of an AI chatbot to the Microsoft Office suite. This would make it possible to go about tasks like working on Docs, Excel, Powerpoint, and other applications integrated directly into ChatGPT, even while working offline. 

And it won’t be banished like it did the last time since the internet age has increased our tolerance for it. [Soon after the release, Microsoft was forced to retire it as a result of heavy user backlash. Its polite, but presumptuous suggestions were deemed intrusive, annoying, and disturbing by many]. As one report puts it, “These days, an annoying Word creature might seem eminently tolerable compared to the ghouls on Twitter. Now that Alexa is in our bedroom and Siri’s in our hand, Clippy is a throwback to what seems like a more benign digital age.” 

Ergo, “the internet is dead”, as some of you might have already declared. With OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, rumours are that it will completely change the search engine game, indicating Microsoft’s plans to have ChatGPT attached to Bing. The integration will directly answer user queries instead of ranking links on the web (a feature which made fortunes for Google). 

The AI disruption will bifurcate the internet landscape into two – the contributors and the freeloaders, a value chain system where information is not overloaded but scarce. As a result, the world wide web will be reduced to merely being datasets to train chatbots. In fact, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told Time, “We’re getting into an era where we have to start thinking about the freeloaders, or people who are reading but not contributing to that information base.” 

ChatGPT aka Clippy on Steroids

But there is more to the story. If we look at the history of Microsoft, from 1990 (when it offered the first version of Microsoft Office for Windows) until now, it has been making applications built essentially on installed desktop software. On the other hand, Google was built on the internet’s foundations, focussing mainly on internet services. 

However, the ‘offline’ bet of Microsoft is how they envision their AI game. So, this is where the homecoming of Clippy also seems inevitable. 

Source: https://i.imgur.com/solP93K.jpg

Coming to be known widely in tech circles as the ‘great-grandfather of ChatGPT’, Clippy was initially launched in Microsoft Office for Windows (versions 97 to 2003). It would hover over the margins on which users did their tasks to ask if they needed help. For instance, it would say, “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” regardless of whether you’re trying to write a letter or not. 

Imagine a world where you’re writing a draft college statement of purpose on your word document. A paperclip-like avatar appears on your screen to ask you the same, “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” and, upon approval, generate an entire document, personalised and available (in all styles and formats) based on a simple prompt. Most importantly, it will be able to do all this without you having to use the cloud for your business. By training LLMs like GPT-3.5 (which runs ChatGPT) on datasets up to a certain time limit (the current model is trained up to data from 2021), you have a product for yourself. This way, Microsoft’s productivity suite just got itself a new moat. 

Google’s redemption arc

But Google is also no fool to the game. Recently, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Deepmind, a subsidiary of Google, said they are considering releasing its own chatbot, Sparrow, for a “private beta” sometime in 2023. Their experience with LaMDA, which garnered a lot of negative publicity for being released too prematurely, has put Google in the backseat but also brought them to the forefront of advocating slow and steady progress in AI. 

Google has a lot of such LLMs in its arsenal (LaMDA, PaLM, and Sparrow). Still, they have only been released in parts (for example, LaMDA recently was integrated into Gmail to summarise conversations in a chat) or, as with the case of Sparrow, for a private beta. Google intends to be low-key about it and bring a diverse range of applications into a variety of its own services, thereby looking at how it could revolutionise the online experience of users. For example, LaMDA, unlike ChatGPT, has shown more capabilities to engage in conversations and discussions with users than OpenAI’s counterpart, which merely spurs answers to questions.  

While Microsoft seems to strengthen its offline play with OpenAI’s API (GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, DALL.E) integrations into its enterprise and customer-line of products, Google is heavy lifting the web-based tools and applications on its models. Will Microsoft be able to reverse the fate it met when the internet disrupted its Office reign?