Microsoft continues to develop and expand AI tools for developers. At its online conference Microsoft Build, Microsoft announces new products and solutions for AI.
Revolutionary advances in artificial intelligence are having a profound impact on Microsoft and the developers who use this technology to improve efficiency, enrich user experiences and achieve new discoveries.
Over the past year, Microsoft has created Microsoft Copilot and released more than 150 updates. They also developed the Copilot stack, which allows developers to create their own copilots. In addition, in the last two years, GitHub Copilot has become the most accepted tool for AI development, with 1.8 million paying subscribers. Microsoft recently launched a new category of Copilot+ computers, fast computers with AI.
Microsoft comments on its Microsoft Build online conference:
We’re an industry leader in artificial intelligence, so as we kick off our major developer event, Microsoft Build, everyone’s asking one question: What’s next?
On Monday, we introduced to the world a new category of Windows computers, Copilot+ computers. These devices are designed to enable developers to deliver diverse AI experiences at the edge and, along with the great features we’re announcing at Build, make Windows the most open platform for AI and the best place for developers.
During Build, we’re also announcing other branches of this technology revolution, including:
- How Microsoft Fabric helps developers and customers leverage data in motion, or digital information transmitted within or between computing systems, to create intelligent applications.
- New boundary models that enable developers to explore multimodal capabilities that support text, images, video, and other types of data in their AI applications, evolving beyond text queries and completions.
- Partnerships that demonstrate how AI can impact the future of many industries, including education.
- And how an open and flexible cloud-based platform, built on a foundation of secure and responsive artificial intelligence, can help developers innovate.
Microsoft Build is always an exciting time for us. Approximately 200,000 people signed up to join us for three days of technical learning and community networking, including 4,000 in person in Seattle. Participants can choose from more than 300 sessions, demonstrations and labs by experts and instructors from Microsoft and our partners. For those unable to attend the live event, most of the content will be available on demand. In total, we will announce about sixty new products and solutions during the event.
Instant decision-making with real-time intelligence
For AI applications to be most effective, companies must be able to qualify, analyze and organize data at the point of ingestion. This step proved difficult. New Real-time intelligence (real-time intelligence) within Microsoft Fabric provides an end-to-end SaaS (Software as a Service) solution that enables users to act on large volumes of time-sensitive and highly granular data to make business decisions faster and clearer.
Microsoft:
Real-Time Intelligence, currently in preview, can be useful for analysts with simple experiments with no or low code, but also for professional developers with code-rich user interfaces. For example, the Dener Motorsport racing team uses Microsoft Fabric to support real-time analytics, storage and reporting, enabling them to maintain peak performance and keep their cars in good condition, thereby improving pilot safety. Dener plans to use Real-Time Intelligence as part of his winning strategy to gain post-swallow insights during races.
Application development requires a certain level of flexibility, customization and efficiency to be feasible for developers. The new Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit makes this possible by enabling independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers to extend applications within Fabric, creating a unique user experience.
The GitHub Copilot experience takes advantage of extensibility
GitHub presents the first setGitHub Copilot Extensions, developed by Microsoft and third-party partners, in private preview. These plugins allow developers and organizations to personalize their GitHub Copilot experience with their favorite services like Azure, Docker, Sentry, and more, right in GitHub Copilot Chat.
GitHub Copilot for Azure, one of Microsoft’s extensions, shows how building in natural language with a wider range of capabilities can accelerate development. Using the Copilot Chat extension, developers can explore and manage Azure resources while troubleshooting and locating relevant logs and code.
Edge models and multimodal capabilities in Azure AI
GPT-4o, OpenAI’s new flagship, is now available in Azure AI Studio and as an API. This multimodal model integrates text, image and audio processing to set a new standard for generative and conversational AI experiences.
This was also announced by Microsoft Phi-3-vision, a new multimodal model in the Phi-3 family of small language models (SLMs) developed by Microsoft, is now available in Azure. Phi-3 models are powerful, cost-effective and optimized for personal devices. Phi-3-vision allows you to enter images and text and receive text responses. For example, users can ask questions about a graph or ask open-ended questions about specific images.
Developers can experiment with these cutting-edge models in Azure AI Playground, and they can start building and customizing models in Azure AI Studio.
Microsoft and Khan Academy use AI to empower educators
Microsoft and Khan Academy announce a partnership to realize the transformative potential of artificial intelligence.
For starters, Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy to offer all US K-12 teachers free access to Khanmigo for Teachers, an AI-powered teaching assistant that frees up teachers’ time so they can focus on what matters most – engaging and helping their students. Microsoft is providing access to AI-optimized Azure infrastructure to increase the availability of Khanmigo for Teachers, which will now be powered by Azure OpenAI Service.
Khan Academy is working with Microsoft to explore the possibilities of improving mathematics teaching in an accessible, scalable and adaptive way with the new release of Phi-3, a family of SLMs developed by Microsoft. They also plan to integrate more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education, to expand resources for students.
New partnership with Cognition AI
Microsoft and Cognition will make Cognition’s standalone AI software agent, Devin, available to customers to help with complex tasks such as code migration and modernization projects. As part of this agreement, Devin will run Azure. Cognition AI is an applied AI lab that develops end-to-end software agents that help developers be more efficient.
Powerful new virtual machines are driving the adoption of artificial intelligence
Microsoft has a unique systems approach to AI infrastructure, which includes hardware and software from Microsoft and its partners, all optimized to run AI workloads at scale and tailored to customer needs.
Microsoft:
We are the first cloud provider to bring AMD’s MI300X AI accelerator chip for AI training and customer inference needs, along with the general availability of a series of virtual machines Azure ND MI300X v5 Optimized for demanding AI and High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads such as Azure OpenAI Service.
Following the launch of Azure Cobalt 100, Microsoft’s first custom-built computing processor, the company is announcing a preview of new Cobalt 100 Arm-based virtual machines (VMs), based on the company’s custom silicon series announced in November 2023.
Microsoft:
THE VM based on Cobalt 100 Arm are the first generation of VMs to feature Microsoft’s new Cobalt processor, tailored for the Arm architecture and optimized for efficiency and performance when running diverse cloud-native workloads. Users can expect a 40% performance improvement over comparable Azure VMs.
The evolution of Copilot
Copilot has been a game changer for many people since its release. Using modern artificial intelligence and large-scale language models (LLM) such as Open AI GPT-4, copilots in all Microsoft products have helped people complete complex tasks, serving as a personal AI assistant behind the scenes.
Microsoft presents Team co-pilotthe Copilot extension for Microsoft 365 that goes from a behind-the-scenes AI personal assistant to a new member of your team.
Microsoft:
You’ll be able to call Copilot wherever you collaborate—in teams, loops, scheduler, and more. Team Copilot can act as a meeting moderator, managing the agenda, keeping track of time and taking notes. Can act as a collaborator in conversations by conveying important information, following up on actions and resolving outstanding issues. He can serve as a project manager to ensure each project runs smoothly and alert the team when they need input.
These initial experiments, which will be shown later in the year, will allow us to learn, iterate and refine as we enter a new phase of innovation where Copilot begins to take more action on behalf of individuals and teams.
Microsoft Copilot Studio introduces new agent capabilities, enabling developers to build copilots that can proactively react to data and events, tailored to specific tasks and functions.
Microsoft:
Copilots built with this new category of capabilities can now autonomously manage complex, long-running business processes by leveraging memory and knowledge for context, thinking about actions and inputs, learning from user feedback, and asking for help when they find themselves in situations where they don’t know what to do . Customers can now set Copilot to work for them, whether for purchasing IT equipment or a concierge for sales and after-sales services.
Copilot extensions, including plug-ins and connectors, allow users to enhance Microsoft Copilot by connecting to new data sources and applications, expanding its functionality.
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