The explosion of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI has tech giants scrambling to rethink and rewrite their product plans to capitalize on the trend, Axios' Scott Rosenberg reports.

What's happening: Every major tech company has been investing in AI for years, but the overnight ChatGPT craze that kicked off at the end of 2022 has given the industry a ravenous appetite for one specific flavor of AI: generative programs that produce text, images and other content in response to user prompts.

Driving the news: ChatGPT went from zero to millions of users on a trajectory that left observers agape. Estimates have suggested ChatGPT has topped 100 million monthly active users and is seeing roughly 5 million users a day, per the New York Times.

Microsoft

Microsoft's close relationship with and longstanding investments in ChatGPT creator OpenAI insured that the business-software giant would take a lead in deploying generative AI-based services.

• Last week Microsoft rolled out a premium version of its Teams groupware integrating ChatGPT-based tools for summarizing meeting notes, organizing personal tasks and translating texts.
• The company is also widely expected to use ChatGPT-style AI to reshape its Bing search engine in an attempt to outflank Google. Many observers also assume the company intends to find ways to integrate ChatGPT with Word, Outlook and other programs.

Google

Google has been working for years on the same kind of large language model-based generative AI that powers ChatGPT, and the company pioneered a key element of the technology. One of its projects, LaMDA, even inspired a Google engineer to claim that the program had achieved sentience.

• But Google moved cautiously to open up its research out of concerns over applications' accuracy, trustworthiness and potential for bias — problems that ChatGPT and every similar program share.
• The advent of ChatGPT reportedly led Google CEO Sundar Pichai to declare a "code red," consult with company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and fast-track a number of generative-AI-related projects.
• In late January Google showed off demos of a new generative AI project that can create a wide range of music from a user's text prompt.

Meta

Facebook parent Meta has sunk fortunes into AI, using it to rank News Feed items, moderate content, translate text and perform many other tasks.

• It has detailed a number of efforts in the generative space, including text-to-image and text-to-video.
• But two recent public demos by Meta of generative-AI projects went awry, with the ChatGPT-like Blenderbot drawing criticism for its low-quality output and ready embrace of conspiracy theories, and the academic research-focused Galactica getting panned for its inaccuracies.
• AI and generative AI were mentioned many more times on the company's earnings call last week than "metaverse," the emerging technology CEO Mark Zuckerberg has bet the company on.
• Experts see potential for Meta to use AI to generate and populate the virtual worlds it aims to build — but first it has to provide reasons for users to want to visit them.

Amazon

Amazon uses AI for Alexa's voice recognition, to optimize its warehouse operations, and for other purposes, but it has not yet openly hopped on the generative AI bandwagon.

• Reports that some software developers inside Amazon were using ChatGPT as a coding aid led a lawyer to order employees not to share corporate information with the bot over fears that company secrets could leak, per Business Insider.
• ChatGPT "is not concerned about the truth, but just about putting words together convincingly," Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted last week.

Apple

CEO Tim Cook spoke during Apple's earnings call last week about the potential of AI to change just about everything that the company does. However, the examples he offered — detecting heart rhythms and car crashes — don't appear to be tied to the generative AI trend.

• Yes, but: Apple remains a profoundly secretive company. If it has a product that makes use of generative AI in the works, we aren't likely to hear about it until it is ready to launch.

Be smart: AI is already deeply integrated into much of the tech we use every day, from Google Search to Facebook's News Feed to your email spam filters to your phone's voice-to-text function. ChatGPT has shown the industry there's a public hunger for the specific capabilities of generative AI to simulate human conversation and creativity.

Our thought bubble: Tech's chase-the-hotness herd mentality almost always overshoots the mark, and that's likely to be the case with ChatGPT mania. AI has a huge future — but we still don't know what creative and economic uses generative AI will serve, what harms it will cause and what failures it may encounter.

The Federal Trade Commission failed to convince a federal judge to block Meta from purchasing VR fitness startup Within, per a court decision unsealed Friday night, Axios' Ashley Gold reports.

Driving the news: Media outlets reported Meta's win last week; now it's official. Meta will be free to close on its acquisition following the decision from Judge Edward Davila in U.S. District Court in Northern California.

Why it matters: The loss is a blow to FTC chair Lina Khan's effort to apply broad antitrust principles to emerging markets.

Details: At the heart of the FTC's case was an argument that Meta wanted to buy a VR fitness instead of creating its own, and that the VR fitness space would be be more competitive without the acquisition.

Yes, but: Davila didn't find sufficient evidence, after proceedings that included testimony from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, that the FTC could prove its case in a full trial.

What they're saying: "To the extent the FTC implies that — based solely on the objective evidence of Meta’s resources and its excitement for VR fitness — it would have inevitably found and implemented some unspecified means to enter the market, the Court finds such a theory to be impermissibly speculative," the order reads.

• A Meta spokesperson praised the decision and said, "This deal will bring pro-competitive benefits to the ecosystem and spur innovation that will benefit people, developers, and the VR space more broadly."

The other side: Supporters of Khan's agenda have argued that the commission needs to push forward with ambitious cases, even against long odds, in order to advance antitrust law into the digital age.

More than 500 tech companies have announced layoffs since July 2022. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft will each cut more than 10,000 jobs, representing between 5 and 13% of their workforce, per tracking site Layoffs.fyi.

Details: Twitter has cut at least 50% of its workforce since Elon Musk bought the company. At the other end of the spectrum, Apple has so far avoided letting people go.

On Tap

• Today's earnings reports include Pinterest and Take Two Interactive.

Trading Places

• Alondra Nelson, who served as the first woman of color to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is set to step down from her current post as a deputy director at OSTP on Feb. 10, as Axios' Ashley Gold scooped on Friday.

ICYMI

• A San Francisco jury on Friday found Elon Musk and Tesla not liable in a trial over a 2018 tweet in which Musk wrote that he had "funding secured" to take the electric carmaker private. (Axios)
• Dell says it plans to lay off about 6,650 jobs, about 5% of the computer manufacturer's global workforce. (The Verge)

Sergei Ovechkin, the 4-year-old son of Alex Ovechkin, stole the show, garnering a perfect score on his trick shot during Friday's NHL All-Star Skills Challenge.