Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) foray into becoming an AI stock—mostly through its sponsorship of OpenAI, which has yet to go public—hit a stumbling block recently as a major ChatGPT outage hit the over 100 million users of the platform. But now, it’s back up and running.
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The outage struck early in the day, reports note, and after about two hours, a fix was installed that started ChatGPT on recovery. The fix kicked in at 10:33 AM, and by 10:46, ChatGPT’s status returned to “normal responses from our services,” suggesting that the fix worked.
It was a terrible time for an outage, however, as only two days prior, OpenAI launched a developer conference, the first of its kind, to show off the platform and what it can do. Pivoting into an outage that quickly might have cost it some confidence, though a rapid repair process may have brought much of it back.
In other news, Microsoft is rolling out some new protection against “deep fakes,” or false pictures generated by AI, among other things. Not only will Microsoft offer the Content Credentials system created by the Coalition for Content Provenance Authenticity, but it will also bring out a slate of other cybersecurity tools to help protect image authenticity and provenance going forward.
Microsoft also plans to endorse the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act, which will forbid the use of “…materially deceptive content falsely depicting federal candidates.”
What is the Prediction for Microsoft Stock?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on MSFT stock based on 31 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average MSFT price target of $408.83 per share implies 12.82% upside potential.
