Microsoft to developers: Gen AI to help machines understand us

It was an eagerly awaited appointment, given the 200,000 people accredited for the three days of meetings and demos (4,000 will be physically in Seattle), a week after Google I/O, and loaded with many expectations to understand Microsoft's next moves in the field of artificial intelligence. Satya Nadella, the CEO of the Redmond-based company, opened Build 2024 by playing on the 'dream' effect to talk about the new era of AI. Two, in particular, are the dreams that the software giant has been cultivating for decades: computers that can understand us (overturning the notion that it is we who understand machines) and computers that can help us to reason, plan and act more effectively with the information we have at our disposal to an ever-increasing extent. The new generation of artificial intelligence that Microsoft is working on is designed to respond to these dreams, perhaps with the help of that OpenAI that is a distinguished guest at Build in the figure of its CEO, Sam Altman, called on stage to 'talk about what is to come'.

Sul palco il presidente e CEO di Microsoft Satya Nadella

Improving the efficiency of applications and enhancing the user experience is the converging goal of all the Gen AI actions taken by Microsoft over the past twelve months. A few numbers, made official during the event held at Redmond's headquarters: more than 150 updates have been released for Copilot, accompanied by the release of the Copilot stack, which allows developers to build their own copilots, and the numbers that GitHub Copilot can boast, capable of convincing as many as 1.8 million developers to take out a paid subscription and now enriched with new extensions.

Il presidente e CEO di Microsoft Satya Nadella presenta lo stack Copilot

The next steps formalised in these hours are a further ramification, as Microsoft managers have called it, of this technological revolution: from the evolution of Fabric to exploit data in motion (digital information transported between different computer systems) to create intelligent applications to new large-format language models that will allow developers to explore multimodal functionalities that support text, images, video and other types of data in their AI applications to partnerships with companies (public and private) from all sectors that will have to download the benefits of algorithm technology on the ground. All leveraging an open, cloud-based platform (Azure) that guarantees maximum security and responsible use of AI. It cannot go unnoticed, among the 60 new services and products on the launch pad, the announcement of the availability of the new GPT-4o through Azure OpenAI, which will make the model for conversational AI including multimodal input and output available to corporate users and application developers.

The main innovations in the sign of Copilot

One of the leitmotifs of the 2024 edition of Build is Copilot, declined in the various solutions of the Microsoft ecosystem, and therefore the Office package (Word, Excel, Power Point...), the Teams collaboration platform and the Windows operating system. The common denominator of the various novelties brought to the attention of developers is indicative of the line taken by the company to ride the AI wager: simplify the way people interact with software. Nadella himself, moreover, compared Windows Copilot Runtime, which makes it easier to integrate artificial intelligence into applications, to a milestone in the software giant's history such as Win32. Prominent in the roundup of announcements, for instance, are the new options (available in preview mode later this year) for creating customised Copilots within Sharepoint completely autonomously by exploiting the development tools of Copilot Studio or Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code. These assistants, Microsoft explains, will be able to provide answers based on content in the company's Sharepoint account and can also be shared with colleagues within the company.