Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Tension and confusion have made the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI “awkward,” people familiar with the matter revealed in a Wall Street Journal report today.

Not only has this tension and confusion extended to Microsoft’s internal AI team—which apparently is dealing with budget cuts and limited access to OpenAI technology—but sources said it also clouded Microsoft’s controversial rollout of AI-powered Bing search last February. At that time, Bing was found to be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks revealing company secrets and providing sometimes inaccurate and truly unhinged responses to user prompts.

According to WSJ, OpenAI warned Microsoft “about the perils of rushing to integrate OpenAI’s technology without training it more” and “suggested Microsoft move slower on integrating its AI technology with Bing.” A top concern for OpenAI was that Bing’s chatbot, Sydney, might give inaccurate or unhinged responses, but this early warning seemingly was easily ignored by Microsoft.