Build 2024: Microsoft conjures up the new AI era
From PC to AI PC: The focus at Microsoft Build is clearly on AI. The company will be presenting numerous innovations during the conference.
Satya Nadella presents numerous innovations.
(Image: Screenshot Microsoft Build Keynote.)
"Access to information becomes access to expertise", says a video that runs at the start of Build 2024. After new hardware and associated AI functions were announced on the eve of Microsoft's in-house developer conference, the focus will be on developers from Tuesday. And with them, the question of how AI can be used to make the PC even more personal. It is "the time of AI transformation", according to Microsoft, which was referred to as "the era of AI" by Google at I/O last week.
"Developer conferences are always particularly fun when something fundamentally changes," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the start of Build, recalling turning points in the company's history such as the introduction of Win32, Dot.net and Azure. "I think we're at that point again." This new generation of AI is for everyone, everywhere in the world. Thanks to AI, you can learn new things, use it to educate yourself, to do your job better and more efficiently and to participate in the world; AI can also unleash creativity. Nadella recalls two dreams from the early days of personal computers in the 1970s: Computers need to understand us, not us the computer. And: computers can help us organize the immense flood of information. "Here we are, we have real breakthroughs on both fronts."
Developers as Build's new old target group
Nadella is also directly addressing developers, who he believes have a particularly high impact. According to Microsoft, GitHub Copilot now has 1.8 million paying subscribers. GitHub is now getting Copilot Extensions, which Microsoft itself, but also third-party providers, can offer. "These extensions allow developers and enterprises to customize their GitHub Copilot experience with their favorite services like Azure, Docker, Sentry and more directly in GitHub Copilot Chat."
In his keynote, Nadella announced that the open-source AI framework PyTorch, which is standard in AI research, will run natively on Windows via the DirectML interface. Previously, PyTorch only worked with the CUDA framework and therefore exclusively with Nvidia hardware. The developer preview for the new function will begin immediately, says Nadella.
OpenAI's new "flagship" model GPT-4o will also be available via Microsoft Azure AI Studio. The omnimodel should be able to process text, audio and vision natively at the same time, making it significantly faster and more cost-effective. Also, newly available is Microsoft's own multimodal model Phi-3-Vision, a Small Language Model (SLM) - which is also cost-efficient and optimized for personal devices. Phi-3 is a whole family of models, comparable to Google's Gemini models. You can enter text and images with Phi-3-Vision, but only receive text in response. Developers can already experiment with it in the Azure AI Playground, a kind of test environment.
In the rental server business, Microsoft also wants to offer its customers a product with a self-developed processor in the future. In the future, Azure will feature virtual machines that run on the Cobalt 100 chip, which Microsoft announced in November 2023 . The ARM processor is expected to run 40 percent more efficiently than comparable Azure VMs. For AI applications, Microsoft will be renting out machines with the MI300X AI accelerator from AMD.
The presentation of the AI data analysis platform called Microsoft Fabric, which interacts with Power BI, among other things, and obtains data from various sources, including Redis and other databases, and thus generates clear real-time visualizations using AI and without programming experience (i.e. with low-code), was colorful and overwhelming at first glance.
Copilot as an AI assistant in the office and living room
If you want to impress your children on the computer, you can also use Copilot in future to do better at Minecraft. The copilot observes what happens in the game and can comment on it. In Microsoft's eyes, it's apparently not cheating if Copilot gives you step-by-step instructions on what to do. Everyone in the living room can find out for themselves whether the kids see it the same way.
With Team Copilot, an extension of Copilot for Microsoft 365, the AI assistant is also moving into Teams, Loop, Planner and other applications. However, it will not be available until later this year. Nadella says that Team Copilot is a team assistant. Writing comments, keeping an eye on projects, finding topics - the assistant will be able to do all of this in the Team applications in the future.
Agents should be customized Copilots that you create yourself and that do what you want them to do. They can be created in the future Microsoft Copilot Studio.
Microsoft and Khan Academy
A new cooperation with the Khan Academy will also be presented at Build. This is a learning environment that can be used to book virtual courses. The partnership also includes an AI assistant especially for teachers. Khan Academy is working with Microsoft to make math tutoring affordable, scalable and customizable. The new version of Phi-3, from the SLM family developed by Microsoft, will be used for this. Conversely, more learning content from Khan Academy will be incorporated into Copilot and Teams for Education.
(emw)
