Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

They're back. They're all back. The page of the epidemic has been turned, and the annual meeting of large science and technology companies has fully returned offline this year. Following the I / O developer conference held at Google headquarters two weeks ago, the Microsoft Build developer conference opened in Seattle today. In two weeks' time, Apple's WWDC developer conference will also be held at its Silicon Valley headquarters.

In fact, Apple's WWDC was partially resumed offline last year, but this year's Build conference is the first time it has been held offline since 2019. After two years of watching keynote speeches online, developers of Microsoft's ecological platform can return to Seattle this year to listen closely to Microsoft executives and communicate with technical experts. Of course, ticket prices are as high as $1525.

At Google's I / O conference two weeks ago, generative AI became the absolute theme. The previous protagonist Android didn't arrive until 80 minutes later, and he was briefly introduced. Google executives said AI more than 140 times during the two-hour keynote speech. Although Google only mentions OpenAI once, everyone knows that the biggest purpose of this year's I / O conference is to prove that Google is still competitive and can cope with the impact of ChatGPT and Microsoft.

This year's I / O has become Google's AI presentation. Google has released 15 AI products with features covering many areas, the most important of which is the new language training model PaLM 2 and generative AI Bard based on the new model. Google has revamped the AI experience for almost all of its products: from search to maps to email to office components, to name a few.

At today's Microsoft Build conference, AI has also become the only focus. Microsoft CEO Nadella focused on AI as soon as he took the stage, announcing more than 50 updates for developers. All the new products released today are permeated with an unmistakable strategy: Microsoft is going all out to promote its own AI, fully connect ChatGPT with its own products, strengthen its productivity edge, and put more pressure on Google in search.

What major products and updates were announced at Microsoft Build today?

Get through the ChatGPT plug-in

The most important news today is that Microsoft announced that it will adopt the same open plug-in Plugin standard as OpenAI, which has opened up the interoperability and interoperation between ChatGPT and Microsoft, and realized the interoperability between products and services. Future developers' plug-ins can support both ChatGPT and Microsoft products and services.

This means that AI programs developed by Microsoft's large group of developers on Azure OpenAI Enterprise Services also support the same development plug-in standard. Developers can choose human natural language interaction as a way to interact with their software. In other words, their software and applications can get the experience of generative AI.

Plug-ins are a key part of AI application development, and developers need to access real-time information and business data of other software services through API interface. Plug-ins can bring new computing power to AI.

After Microsoft has opened up the standard with OpenAI, developers can access applications and services to Microsoft 365 Copilot through plug-ins. The first supported plug-ins include ChatGPT, Teams information extensions, Power Platform connectors, etc. Developers can directly access existing services or use Microsoft Teams Toolkit development tools on Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio to easily develop new Microsoft 365 Copilot plug-ins.

Developers can also import data into Microsoft Graph and build relevance and action information through the recently released Semantic Index for Copilot semantic indexing feature, thus further expanding the capabilities of Microsoft 365Copilot. During the public trial, more than 50 plug-ins from Atlassian, Adobe, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters, Moveworks, Mural and other partners will be available. When Microsoft 365 Copilot is officially released, thousands of plug-ins will be available.

(Windows 11 joins AI Assistant Copilot)

Windows 11 joins AI Assistant

For consumers, the most important product released by Build today is the introduction of the generative AI helper Windows Copilot in Windows 11. Compared with the previous intelligent voice assistant Cortana, Copilot not only has a higher level of intelligence, but also has significantly improved system permissions.

Copilot is a strategic product released by Microsoft this year, which has been translated as "smart co-driver". Microsoft and OpenAI cooperate deeply to launch AI Assistant Copilot on Microsoft 365and Dynamics 365and Power Platform, which is trained based on large language model and based on natural language understanding and generated human-computer interaction experience.

The taskbar of Windows 11 will be connected to the Copliot icon. When the user clicks the icon, a Copilot dialog box appears on the right side of the screen, analyzing, explaining and summarizing the applications and web pages that are currently in use. Of course, this assistant can also complete many user instructions, including online search and booking services.

Windows Copilot is still in the testing phase. Microsoft plans to start a formal public trial in June and gradually extend it to all Windows 11 users. Currently, Windows 10 and 11 have more than 1.4 billion monthly active users worldwide.

In addition to the major update of Copilot, Windows 11 also adds real-time subtitle support for 10 new languages and dialects, and allows real-time audio listening and copying. Natural language processing itself is Microsoft's technical strength. In addition, Windows 11 also supports low-power Bluetooth technology Bluetooth lE to enjoy high-quality audio while reducing power consumption.

(AI Assistant Copilot joins Edge browser)

The first AI supports browsers

In addition to adding Copilot to Windows 11, Microsoft also introduced 365Copilot in Edge browsers. This is the first browser that natively supports AI. The Copilot tool icon appears in the sidebar of the Edge browser to analyze the content of the web page that the user is browsing, to help the user generate Windows 365documents such as Word, Excel, or to write Outlook mail.

Edge for Business commercial browsers support more enterprise management, security, privacy, and productivity features to better meet the needs of mixed offices. A preview of the version for managed devices is now available, and an unmanaged version will be launched in the coming months. In addition, Edge Workspaces, which supports multi-user collaboration, will end the preview within a few months and launch an official commercial version.

According to Statcounter, Chrome's market share reached 66% in April, while Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Edge tied for second and third place with 11%. Microsoft hopes that working with ChatGpt to bring generative AI to Edge browsers will help Edge close the gap with Chrome and have a real impact on Google.

(Windows application is added to AI evaluation on the shelf)

The Windows App Store has also ushered in an upgrade to the AI experience, adding a summary of user reviews generated by AI. In addition to traditional user ratings, the application display bar will also show a summary generated by AI based on user reviews. However, Microsoft did not say whether AI would filter out some artificially bad reviews.

(Windows Terminal joins AI support)

The terminal application Windows Terminal also adds the generative AI function, which is implemented through GitHub Copilot. Developers can use GitHub Copilot to use chatbots on Terminal, asking AI to recommend code or explain errors. Microsoft also said that other development tools such as WinDBG will also join AI chat robots through GitHub Copilot. Windows Terminal is a virtual terminal application released by Microsoft in 2019. Users can download and install it in the Windows App Store or install it themselves through Github download code. This tool realizes the unity of PowerShell, CMD and WSL environment.

(Bing becomes the default search engine for ChatGPT)

Bing networking for ChatGPT

This is as expected by everyone, and Microsoft today officially announced that Bing has become the default search engine for ChatGPT. ChatGPT training data was originally supported by Microsoft and conducted on the Azure cloud platform, but the previous training data is only until September 2021, which is Google Bard's biggest advantage over ChatGPt.

Starting today, ChatGPT Plus users will see content from the Bing search engine marked in the process of replying to the generative AI. In other words, ChatGPT is already networked to provide real-time and up-to-date content. This is a major milestone for ChatGPT products.

(Microsoft continues to expand its base of plug-in partners)

In addition, Bing has launched plug-in support to more enterprise partners. In addition to the previously announced ordering platform OpenTable and professional search engine WolframAlpha, the newly announced partners include travel service platforms Expedia and TripAdvisor, takeout platform Instacart, real estate trading platforms Redfin and Zillow, information provider Thomson Reuters and so on.

During the experience display, users can use the OpenTable plug-in to ask for information about the surrounding restaurant and ask the AI robot to book a table for themselves. It is worth mentioning that such features will also be added to Bing mobile, which means that iOS and Android users can also experience plug-in support in Bing apps.

Clearly, Microsoft is trying to compete with Google by pulling more and more web users into its own AI-supported search camp. Compared with the all-inclusive Google, Microsoft's biggest competitive advantage is that they do not directly compete with these vertical service platforms, so these merchants do not need to worry about Microsoft's preference for their own services.

More AI development tools

Based on the in-depth cooperation between Microsoft and OpenAI, Azure OpenAI enterprise services integrate ChatGPT, GPT-4 and other large models as well as Azure enterprise services. At present, more than 4500 enterprise users have adopted Azure OpenAI enterprise services. Microsoft also announced a number of new AI development tools at the Build conference today to help developers develop their own AI-supported applications based on Microsoft and OpenAI services.

The newly released Azure AI Studio can help developers integrate external data sources into Azure OpenAI services more easily, thus training a conversation model based on their own data. The newly released preview of Azure AI Content Safety can help developers build a more secure online environment and community, and its built-in model can detect inappropriate content in text or images and notify human supervisors to take action. This feature, originally used for Microsoft services such as GitHub Copilot, opens the built-in Azure OpenAI Enterprise service to third-party developers to generate smart content in a responsible manner.

Microsoft has also released new Azure Machine Learning tools, including Responsible AI dashboard support for text and image data. In the public preview version, this feature allows developers to evaluate large models built using unstructured data during the build, training, or evaluation phase. This will help developers find model errors, fairness issues, and model interpretations before deploying the model, thus achieving a more fair, high-performance computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) model.

Azure Machine Learning prompt flow allows developers to build prompt words efficiently with the help of popular open source prompt choreography solutions such as Semantic Kernel. In the upcoming preview, prompt flow provides developers with a more easy-to-use way to prompt, evaluate, and adjust large models. Developers can quickly create prompt workflows connected to various language models and data sources, and evaluate the quality of the workflow through authenticity, so as to choose the best tips for them according to the actual situation.

Prompt flow also integrates Azure AI Content Safety to help developers detect and remove harmful content from their workflows. In addition, Microsoft announced that it will add new media source features to Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator in the coming months. The technology uses encryption methods to mark and sign AI-generated content, which contains metadata about its source, to help developers verify that images or videos are generated by AI.

Microsoft OpenAI win-win combination

There is no doubt that deep cooperation with OpenAI is at the core of Microsoft's AI strategy and the theme of today's Build conference. Whether it is to open the patch boundary with OpenAI, to introduce more developers to develop products with generative AI experience, or to introduce ChatGPT-based Copilot AI assistants into many of their own products, it reflects the close and inseparable strategic cooperation between the two companies.

Investing in OpenAI is Microsoft CEO Nadella's most successful investment, without one. Microsoft not only firmly binds OpenAI to its own cloud service platform, but also combines ChatGPT with its own AI products to transform the AI experience of almost all its products, and ushered in the hope of catching up with Google in the corner.

Microsoft is the most important strategic shareholder in OpenAI. Without the billions of dollars invested by Microsoft and the support of computing resources, it would have been impossible for OpenAI to accelerate the commercial launch of AI in the past few years, launch smarter generative AI products than Google, and grow into an upstart AI valued at $30 billion. The public test of ChatGPT at the end of last year not only changed the landscape of the AI industry, but also put great pressure on Google, the former industry leader.

Although Musk played a key leading role in the founding of OpenAI, attracting enough exposure and talent for the open source non-profit research organization, and even chose the name OpenAI, his influence on OpenAI was limited to the first two years. Since 2018, the progress of OpenAI research and development has nothing to do with Musk, who completely resigned from the OpenAI board on the grounds of conflict of interest.

At that time, OpenAI was a non-profit open source technology organization, which relied on donations from many super-rich and corporate giants, while R & D training and talent recruitment in the field of AI required huge investment. Without commercial restructuring and introducing strategic investment, OpenAI is simply unable to compete with giants such as Google and Meta.

At the beginning of 2019, OpenAI was reorganized into a limited profit organization and began to introduce strategic investment. Microsoft came in almost immediately, announcing an investment of $1 billion and introducing OpenAI's AI training into its own cloud service platform. Over the next four years, Microsoft invested billions of dollars in OpenAI three times. In the past few years, almost all of OpenAI's product training and development has been implemented on Microsoft's cloud platform.

Seeing that OpenAI and Microsoft are inseparable, Musk has become the main critic of OpenAI, continuously criticizing that OpenAI has been controlled by Microsoft, from an open source non-profit organization to a profit-seeking enterprise. But his claim was also publicly refuted by OpenAI CEO Eitman and Microsoft CEO Nadella.

OpenAI has set up a complex mixed structure in the process of restructuring, including the non-profit parent company OpenAI Inch and the limited profit subsidiary OpenAI LP. Although Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in limited-profit subsidiaries, they do not have a board seat on OpenAI Inc, the parent company, and cannot control OpenAI's decisions. And ChatGPT is not exclusive to Microsoft and is open to many other companies.

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