The headlines about problems with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot haven’t dulled Patrick Husting’s enthusiasm for generative synthetic intelligence.
The software program developer and entrepreneur believes this newest wave of AI will remodel each day work and life — describing it as a basic shift on the size of the PC, the web, and the smartphone.
“If I’m a salesman, if I’m a professor, if I’m a lawyer, it’s not going to switch my job … it’s going to enhance me,” Husting says. “It’s going to make me smarter. It’s going to permit me to deliver my details in faster. And it’s going to permit me to get via my job rather more effectively, rather more precisely.”

Husting is the developer of a new third-party add-in called Ghostwriter that lets customers question ChatGPT and different OpenAI language fashions in a sidebar, to have the AI chatbot generate responses and content material instantly within the doc they’re drafting. It’s available for Microsoft Word, Outlook and Excelwith different Workplace merchandise coming quickly.
The add-on for Excel, the most recent addition to the lineup, not solely suggests formulation but additionally finds and pulls in pattern information from the net in response to person queries.
Husting is a Seattle-area enterprise chief, serial entrepreneur, and software program developer who labored in Microsoft’s consulting enterprise within the late Nineteen Nineties. He got here up with the thought for Ghostwriter final fall when he was utilizing ChatGPT for writing help, and obtained bored with slicing and pasting, and switching between home windows.
He understands the advantages that large tech corporations deliver to this subject, together with the monetary and know-how sources to create and practice the big language fashions wanted to make AI work at this degree.
Nonetheless, he’s additionally cautious of them on one other degree.
“I would like individuals to learn from this, and I’m somewhat frightened that these large tech corporations are those which can be going to manage it,” he says.
Husting sees a chance for unbiased builders to unlock the potential of synthetic intelligence for customers throughout totally different platforms. He already affords the power to make use of totally different OpenAI language fashions, and he envisions finally giving customers the choice of utilizing AI from a number of suppliers inside his add-ins.
“That is going to be the following large tech shift,” he says, “and I’m excited to be on that wave.”