Artificial intelligence was the front and center of this year’s Microsoft Build, its annual flagship event for developers. In his opening keynote, Satya Nadella highlighted five biggest announcements of this year’s conference – all of which revolved around how AI will transform the way people use Microsoft products and platforms.
The biggest of all was the integration of Bing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Bing thus became the default search engine for ChatGPT, enabling it to give more up-to-date and higher quality answers sourced from the internet. The feature is available to ChatGPT plus users for now and will be extended to free users soon. This marks another key step in the company’s partnership with and its multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI.
Nadella also announced that the company is bringing Copilot to the biggest canvas of all – the Windows. “This is going to make every user a power use of Windows,” he added. With Windows Copilot, Windows 11 will be the first PC platform to provide centralized AI assistance to users, taking productivity to the next level.
Nadella also introduced the Copilot stack making it available to developers to build their own copilot for their applications. “We will have everything from the AI infrastructure to the foundation model to the AI orchestration, all the way up to your copilot and its extensibility.”
This also means that there will be common extensibility across Bing Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT and Windows Copilot and the users’ own Copilots. Developers can now use one platform to build plugins that work across both consumer and business surfaces, including ChatGPT, Bing, Dynamics 365 Copilot (in preview) and Microsoft 365 Copilot (in preview). “This is one of the most powerful things for a developer to be able to write a plug-in and have it reach billions of users,” Nadella said.
At Build, Microsoft also announced Azure AI studio – a full lifecycle tool chain to be able to build, train and deploy intelligent apps and Copilots. This, according to Microsoft, will enable developers to ground AI models in just a few clicks using structured and unstructured data.
It comes integrated with a Responsible AI dashboard that helps the developers during the testing phase to ensure that the models are safe.
The last one in Nadella’s list, Microsoft Fabric, is an end-to-end analytics product, which the company says can address every aspect of an organization’s analytics needs. Fabric comes with capabilities including data movement, data lakes, data engineering, data integration, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence.
Microsoft made 50+ announcements at this year’s Build conference.
