Microsoft Build 2024: The key AI announcements

Microsoft Corp. is holding its annual developer conference Microsoft Build from May 21-23 in Seattle where its CEO Satya Nadella took centre stage to deliver a keynote address to announce several new updates. On the first day of the event the tech giant unveiled Team Copilot, a new version of its Copilot assistant aimed at enhancing group collaboration, and a slew of artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. 

Several new updates were also made for developers to build more intelligent and interactive applications using AI and generative AI tools.

The updates came just a day after Microsoft announced new Copilot+ PCs, and a week after Alphabet's Google I/O developer conference. Here are the key takeaways:

Introducing Team Copilot and more

Nadella introduced Team Copilot, Copilot Extensions, and other features during first day of the event. Team Copilot is an extension of Microsoft's Copilot chatbot, offering a personal AI assistant to Microsoft 365 users. It can manage agendas, take notes, and provide context-based answers. Team Copilot will be available for preview later this year for select Microsoft 365 customers.

The CEO also introduced new agent capabilities in Microsoft Copilot Studio to help developers build their Copilots. These features are currently accessible through Microsoft's Early Access Program and will be more widely available for preview later this year. Copilot extensions were also unveiled, enabling users to connect to new sources and applications to enhance the assistant's functionalities.

The first set of Copilot extensions for GitHub, Microsoft's developer platform, was introduced, allowing developers to customise their GitHub experience. These extensions are currently available in private preview.

New Small Language Model and Real-Time Intelligence

Microsoft unveiled Phi-3-vision, a novel multimodal model equipped with audio and vision capabilities. This latest addition joins Microsoft's Phi-3 lineup of small language models (SLMs), which are designed to be more affordable alternatives to large language models (LLMs) and cater to specific applications. The Phi-3 SLMs can be accessed through Azure AI and Hugging Face platforms.

Moreover, Nadella revealed Real-Time Intelligence on Microsoft Fabric, an AI-driven analytics platform that enables instantaneous decision-making for businesses. This functionality is currently in the preview stage.

Microsoft Edge can translate YouTube videos into multiple languages

Microsoft’s Edge browser is getting an AI-powered real-time video translation feature that can dub videos from sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, Reuters, and Coursera. Nadella said that the feature currently works with a handful of languages, offering translation from Spanish to English or vice versa — or from English to German, Hindi, Italian, and Russian. Microsoft said the feature is “coming soon” and that more languages and video platforms will be added soon.

Expanding AI partnerships with Hugging Face and others

Microsoft has expanded its AI partnerships with Hugging Face, a machine learning (ML) and data science platform and community, to bring its models to Azure AI studio.  

“By combining Microsoft's robust cloud infrastructure with Hugging Face's most popular Large Language Models (LLMs), we are enhancing our copilot stacks to provide developers with advanced tools and models to deliver scalable, responsible, and safe generative AI solutions for custom business need,” said Nadella.

Microsoft announced a multi-faceted partnership with Khan Academy to help the educational institute explore opportunities to improve math tutoring in an affordable, scalable and adaptable manner with the new version of Phi-3. They also plan to bring more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education, expanding resources for learners.

The big tech also announced a new partnership with Cognition AI, an AI startup specialising in software development on Azure. Cognition’s autonomous AI software agent, Devin, helps customers with complex tasks such as code migration and modernisation projects.

New updates on Microsoft's Custom Chip and AI infra

The company announced a preview of its new custom silicon Arm-based (ARM) processor announced in November, Cobalt 100. Nadella highlighted the chip’s performance capabilities for running general and cloud-native workloads, saying that the new custom silicon provides a 40% improvement in performance.

Microsoft also said that it is ‘the first cloud provider to bring AMD’s leading MI300X AI accelerator chip to power customers’ AI training and inferencing needs’ through the Azure ND MI300X v5 series. The company said the chip is part of its holistic infrastructure approach to AI.