The wildly successful public buzz draws internal and external money towards the project. Outsiders now see Microsoft as freshly repositioned against Google, and

The wildly successful public buzz draws internal and external money towards the project. Outsiders now see Microsoft as freshly repositioned against Google, and OpenAI as a rising rocket; internal budget is likewise drawn to related endeavors because everybody wants to claim a piece of whatever hits big. Meanwhile, yes, the preview provides both training data for the tooling, which has engineering value in AI, and usage data into how users think about this technology and what they intuitively want to do with it, which helps guide future product development. Both these reasons are also why they’re (1) being so careful to avoid scandal, and (2) being very slow to clear up public misconceptions. An safe, excited public that’s fully engaged with the tool (even if misusing and misunderstanding it) is worth a ton of money to them right now and so has plenty of justification to absorb investment. It won’t last forever, but a new innovation door seems to have opened and we’ll probably see this pattern a lot for a while.