The funny thing to me is that it’s still basically machine learning, the same tech that we’ve had since the mid 2000s, it’s just we have fancier hardware now.
So much of the modern Microsoft/ChatGPT project is effectively brute-forcing intelligence from accumulated raw data. That's why they need phenomenal amounts of electricity, processing power, and physical space to make the project work.
There are other - arguably better, but definitely more sophisticated - approaches to developing genetic algorithms and machine learning techniques. If any of them prove out, they have the potential to render a great deal of Microsoft's original investment worthless by doing what Microsoft is doing far faster and more efficiently than the Sam Altman "Give me all the electricity and money to hit the AI problem with a very big hammer" solution.