• Microsoft's CEO has said OpenAI's two-year lead in the AI race gave it "escape velocity" to build out ChatGPT.
• Satya Nadella told a podcast this gave OpenAI "two years of runway" to work "pretty much uncontested."
• Microsoft stepped up investing in the startup after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said OpenAI has benefited from a two-year lead in the AI race to work "pretty much uncontested."

The startup, in which Microsoft has been investing since 2019, prompted an AI arms race when it released ChatGPT in November 2022, which Nadella said gave it an "escape velocity."

The launch left rival companies such as Google battling claims they had been caught off guard by the chatbot's launch.

"The advantage we have had, and OpenAI has had, which is we've had two years of runway — pretty much uncontested," Nadella said on an episode of the "BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley" released on Thursday.

"I don't think they'll be ever again, maybe, be a two-year lead like this," Nadella said. "I think it's unlikely that that type of lead could be established with some foundation model, but we have that advantage, that was the great advantage we've had with OpenAI."

After ChatGPT's launch, Microsoft capitalized on its 2019 investment to build a closer partnership with OpenAI and began incorporating the company's tech into its Office apps, the Bing search engine, and Edge — beating its biggest rivals to market.

In return, Microsoft has provided OpenAI with massive cloud-computing resources.

Microsoft was an early investor in OpenAI, investing $1 billion in 2019. The tech giant has invested a total of $13 billion in the company, according to its latest Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

In the same filing, Microsoft described its relationship with OpenAI as an equity investment rather than a partnership, as it had previously done.

In its July SEC filing, it listed OpenAI alongside Anthropic and Meta as "emerging competitors."

• Microsoft's Bing search engine has Copilot AI features built into it.
• Copilot, integrated into Bing, can perform tasks like writing poems and making reservations.
• Here's how to use the AI service in Bing.

Microsoft first unveiled a revamped, AI-powered version of its search engine, Bing, last year.

The new Bing, which promised to be "more powerful than ChatGPT," runs on Microsoft's own next-generation language model called "Prometheus." The proprietary technology was developed using elements of OpenAI's most advanced GPT models as part of Microsoft's partnership with the company.

Built into the revamped search engine is Microsoft's AI chatbot, Copilot, which can perform a number of tasks the old Bing never dreamed of, like suggesting recipes, writing poems, conducting image-based search queries, and making restaurant reservations. Copilot was formerly called Bing Chat.

Microsoft's Bing was launched in 2009, more than a decade after Google's launch — and though it's come a long way since then, Bing still holds a fraction of the market share compared to Google.

And though Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once raved that Copilot would "fundamentally transform our relationship with technology," the AI assistant has struggled to live up to the hype, both inside and outside the company.

Here's a step-by-step walkthrough of how to access and use the new Bing with Copilot.

How to use the new Bing

1. Go to Bing.com/new in your internet browser.

   Note: You don't need to download Microsoft's web browser, Edge, but if you do, Copilot is integrated directly into the browser, with an icon in the top-right corner that lets you chat with the AI companion.

   

2. There are a few ways to use AI in your search experience from the Bing homepage.

3. One option is to click "Try now" underneath the heading "Bing generative search," located directly below the general search bar on the Bing homepage.

   

   • The "Try now" button takes you to a search results page that auto-populates for the query "How can I get started with learning to play the guitar."
   • The page displays several helpful resources related to that query, including a Table of Contents with sections that guide you through the process of learning to play guitar, alongside videos and step-by-step instructions.

   

   • You can also type in your own query, like "How to paint a bathroom," and, depending on the query you search, the results will offer helpful sections including relevant videos, instructions, and, in this case, a section on the side for the best paint to use on bathroom cabinets.

     

4. Another option is to click "Copilot" in the bar at the very top of the Bing homepage.

   

   • This takes you to the Copilot homepage where you can message the chatbot.

   • In the "Message Copilot" text field at the bottom of the page, you can type something you need help with, like, for example, "Write me a poem," or "plants that survive with minimal light." The chatbot will quickly give you a detailed response — for example, it offered 10 options for plants that don't need much light.

     

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called for a culture change amid the company's security challenges.
• The company has contended with the global CrowdStrike outage and vulnerability to Chinese hacks.
• Microsoft has accepted responsibility for security flaws, acknowledging breaches by hackers.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, doesn't have the best track record regarding security.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company needs to change that. "That's what will be culture change," he said in a recent Wired interview.

Microsoft has faced a series of high-profile cybersecurity challenges over the past year.

In July, the company was at the center of a global IT outage caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. In March, a report from the US Department of Homeland Security flagged Microsoft's security systems as inadequate and called for an "overhaul," noting that the company was particularly vulnerable to attacks from a Chinese hacking group called Storm-0588.

Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, acknowledged these flaws in a written statement to the Department of Homeland Security in June. "Before I say anything else, I think it's especially important for me to say that Microsoft accepts responsibility for each and every one of the issues cited in the CSRB's report," he wrote.

Earlier in the year, Microsoft said that its systems had also been compromised by the Russian hacking group Midnight Blizzard, which accessed a "very small percentage" of corporate email accounts. This group was also responsible for the 2020 attack on SolarWinds, a major IT firm that counts Microsoft as one of its primary clients.

Since taking the helm in 2014, Nadella has been known for leading empathetically and emphasizing that change wouldn't come from blaming employees. "This is not about a witch hunt internally at Microsoft," he told Wired. However, he said that "perverse incentives" often lead companies to prioritize product development over securing existing products.

That mindset may have played a role in the SolarWinds attack. A ProPublica report in June found that Microsoft knowingly hid a security flaw in one of its services to avoid jeopardizing its chances of securing government investment in its cloud business. The flaw was later exploited by the Russian hackers behind the attack.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Elle took a job in the tech industry about seven years ago, right when product management was "getting hot," she says. While the companies she's since worked for have had vastly different expectations of her, one thing has been consistent: clashes with other teams. Product managers serve as a bridge between engineers, salespeople, customer-service agents, and workers in other departments, and getting them to work together to build products that people actually need can be fractious.

"If you're an engineer and you have an idea, and then you have this outside figure come in and say, 'Why are you doing it this way?' — some can see that as great collaboration," says Elle, who asked that I use only her first name. "Other people are like, 'Whoa, you're slowing me down.'"

The product manager has become a powerful, highly paid, and polarizing figure. At some tech companies their colleagues refer to them, both affectionately and disparagingly, as "mini-CEOs" of the products they manage. Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and YouTube's Neal Mohan climbed their way up from product manager to CEO, and they deploy legions of PMs to help run their companies.

Coworkers don't always have fuzzy feelings about product managers. X abounds with snarky memes about their purposelessness, their illiteracy of Python and C++, their penchant for saying "no updates from me" in update meetings. On forums and subreddits, their more-technical colleagues belittle their work as fluff. "Is product manager the most useless role in tech?" an engineer posted on Blind. Another accused product managers of "stealing a living": "As an engineer, I feel I can easily do their job in addition to mine with not much extra effort," they wrote. One person on Reddit argued that product managers "just attend meetings and get paid more than the actual people doing the work."In a LinkedIn post titled "Product is too important. So we got rid of product managers," the founder of a digital banking startup wrote, "Any function that needs a decade to explain what it actually is or isn't doing is at very high risk of somehow being lost."

Several companies, from Airbnb to Snap, are now reconsidering the utility of product managers entirely, while others claim that the product manager's reign will only expand in the age of AI. How did a role that barely existed before the 2000s become one of the most influential and controversial presences in tech?

The seed of product management dates back to at least the 1930s, when Procter & Gamble created a position called the "brand man" whose job it was to understand customer problems. Inspired by this, Hewlett-Packard pioneered the tech product manager role in the 1960s. Microsoft began hiring what it called "program managers" in the 1980s. In the 2000s, as companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon expanded to create ever more products, product managers proliferated. Hardware and software also became more complicated, and the engineers and developers building it had less time to figure out what was actually useful — companies realized they needed someone dedicated to translating customer needs.

Product became a path into tech for people with backgrounds in consulting or MBAs. A "golden era" of product management emerged in the run of zero interest rates in the 2010s. Companies gobbled up talent, sometimes hiring beyond their needs just to keep smart workers from going to competitors. Big Tech companies became bloated, paying middle managers high salaries to optimize products and development. Carnegie Mellon University began offering what it calls a first-of-its-kind master's degree in product management in 2018. The next year, U.S. News and World Report named product manager a top-five job for MBA grads.

"The shift in power moved from engineering to product managers," says Hubert Palan, the CEO of Productboard, a company that provides software for product managers. That's part of the friction: Those on the tech side often think the product manager doesn't understand how things work, but the product manager may think the engineers are building tools that people don't actually want or need, even if they're feats in coding.

"The product manager is at the center of everything," says Avi Siegel, a former product manager who's working on his own startup, Momentum. "If sales wants one thing and marketing wants one thing and customer success wants one thing, they disagree, and you can only choose one of the groups to side with — you're only going to keep one of those people happy."

"Product management is mostly necessary, but it can be done very badly," says Aaron, a software engineer who asked me to use only his first name. He says he's worked with both excellent and terrible product managers. At best, they bear the burden of understanding the tech a market needs. At worst, they don't acknowledge how technically difficult a solution they demand might be, which leads to ire, fatigue, and failure. "We would be asked for the moon with no collaboration," Aaron says.

Whether their coworkers are happy about it or not, product managers are gaining recognition. A 2007 study found that as the product-management role became more formalized at companies, projects were finished closer to deadlines and with more predictability. A 2020 report from McKinsey said that "creating a comprehensive product-management function" was one of the four most important things a company could do to grow its software business faster. According to ZipRecruiter, the average product manager in the US makes about $160,000. Software engineers, meanwhile, average about $147,000, and tech marketing specialists average about $87,000.

Product managers described the role to me as more intuitive and right-brained than left-brained (though there are plenty of technical PMs, many of them former engineers). The career site Zippia says the proportion of women working in product management rose to nearly 35% in 2021 from about 19% in 2010. That's compared to just 22% of all tech workers. Some women in product management I spoke to say part of the suspicion of their role's utility could be rooted in sexism. In 2022, two women who worked as product managers posted a TikTok explaining what they did for work, while they worked from a pool. The video drew hundreds of harsh comments. "Dealing with most product managers is a headache and a half and we usually hate talking to you," one person responded.

"Every woman that I've met with, if they're interested in a company, their first question is: Am I technical enough?" Elle says. "Every guy I've met, that question doesn't cross their mind." It makes her wonder if it's easier for men in product management to push back and say no to some ideas without looking like naysayers.

Empathy came up in every conversation I had for this story. Like a deft diplomat, a good product manager can empathize with the needs and concerns of every stakeholder, Palan says. Meg Watson, a product manager who has worked for Spotify and Stitch Fix, says product managers who try to rule with an iron fist "quickly learn that doesn't work." She describes working as a product manager as emotional and intense and says many of them experience the tension of their role daily. When she asks people looking for advice on getting into product management why they want to, they say they want power. "You will have power," Watson says. "You will also have accountability and pressure and stress."

And now some companies are ditching them. The Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky said last year that the company had combined the product-management function with product marketing. The rising call for executives to go "founder mode" — a concept touted by Chesky and coined by the Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham — has some questioning whether they should be delegating product decisions to product managers. A spokesperson for Snap told The Information last fall that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company's decision-making. Smaller firms ponder the utility of bringing on product managers at all.

But others say the scope of product managers, though it may draw engineers' ire, is more likely to expand across the industry. "The future really does belong to product managers," says Frank Fusco, a product manager turned CEO of a software company called Silicon Society. As artificial intelligence gets more adept at coding, he says, some engineering tasks could become redundant — and that could be a boon for product managers. (Pichai, a former product manager, said last month that more than a quarter of Google's new code was created by AI.) Fusco says the AI boom is a classic product-manager problem: What do customers actually want the tech to do? As investors and executives are hungry for AI and many consumers are skeptical, Fusco predicts a rising demand for product managers to help bridge that gap.

"The revenge of the PMs is coming," he says. "I would expect to see PMs becoming more prestigious and empowered."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.