OpenAI Quietly Designed a Rival To Google Workspace, Microsoft Office

OpenAI has designed features that would allow people to collaborate on documents and communicate via chat within ChatGPT, The Information reported Tuesday. The features would pit OpenAI directly against Microsoft, its biggest shareholder and business partner, and Google, whose search engine has already lost traffic to people using ChatGPT for web searches.

Whether OpenAI will actually release the collaboration features remains unclear, the report cautioned. The designs would target the core of Microsoft's dominant productivity suite and could strain the companies' already complicated relationship as OpenAI seeks Microsoft's approval for restructuring its for-profit unit. Product chief Kevin Weil first discussed and showed off designs for document collaboration nearly a year ago, but OpenAI lacked sufficient staff to develop the product due to other priorities.

OpenAI launched Canvas in October, a ChatGPT feature that makes drafting documents and code easier with AI assistance, as a possible first step toward full collaboration tools. More recently, OpenAI developed but has not launched software allowing multiple ChatGPT customers to communicate about shared work within the application.

They should use AI to write the code

[Laxator2]

" ... OpenAI lacked sufficient staff to develop the product due to other priorities."
Why do they need staff? Can't they use generative AI to write the code?
In the meantime I'll ask ChatGPT to help me paint the fence in the garden.

If they hype was true, it would be in beta by now

[Somervillain]

" ... OpenAI lacked sufficient staff to develop the product due to other priorities." Why do they need staff? Can't they use generative AI to write the code?

You make an excellent point. If these tools were any good, you'd be able to design a beta-worthy app in a weekend, if that. These AI houses should be able to develop software at unfathomable speeds....but as a daily user of Claude 4.0 plugin (mandate from employer) and seeing that it often can't even match braces in simple Java refactors...I wouldn't hold my breath. My experiences with ChatGPT were far worse.

Have at it, please!

[SmaryJerry]

I will be so happy if they design a better mail app. 'New Outlook' is the worst downgrade in history, worse than the Vista debacle. Literally all OpenAI has to do is replicate 'Classic Outlook' and make a good way to migrate exchange email addresses over, assuming Microsoft doesn't do a 180 on their Outlook design. I'm still in the camp that thinks someone at Microsoft someone literally did not know the Mail app and Outlook were two different programs, and accidentally implemented the Mail app update on Out

Re:

[gtall]

I'm on Mac and am forced to use fucking Outlook. The Classic sucked, the New is passable.....still, it suffers from the usual MS crap like getting itself confused.

You're assuming it's an Outlook competitor

[Somervillain]

...vs a scheme to suck your data into their training model....how much do you trust your e-mail information not to leak out? Google and MS want to mine your data to serve you ads. What does OpenAI want to do?...I'd wager train models.

Re: You're assuming it's an Outlook competitor

[sixminuteabs]

We are not talking about outlook.com. Google is the ad whore in this convo donâ(TM)t distort that

Google list traffic to ChatGPT

[Soleen]

"already lost traffic to people using ChatGPT for web searches" Is there a link that supports this statement?

Re:

[jaaori]

Not that I have a link, but I'm not surprised as I know a few people that do that for some of the quick questions they'd before be using google, they still will go to google if the question is important enough or not happy with chatgpts' answer.
I suppose there's more of them in the world enough to make a dent.