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Hello readers,
Welcome to another edition of This Week in the Future! Ignite 2023 just happened, where Microsoft announced their own AI chips, an avatar generator, AI that cleans your office, and the rebranding of Bing Chat into Copilot. Plus, Retool has published their 2023 State of AI Report with data from 1,500 tech professionals.
As always, thanks for being a subscriber! We hope you enjoy this week’s content — for a video breakdown, check out the episode on YouTube.
Let’s get into it!
Microsoft Ignite 2023
Image generated by DALL·E 3
Get ready to hear the word ‘Copilot’ a lot. This year’s Ignite conference reinforced Microsoft as not only a platform company, but as CEO Satya Nadella declared, the Copilot company. Let’s take a look at what was announced:
AI and Cloud Computing Innovations
AI Focus: Microsoft highlighted its commitment to AI, integrating new AI capabilities across its products and services. This includes the availability of GPT-4 Turbo with Vision (GPT-4V), OpenAI’s multimodal language model, inside Azure.
Azure Developments: New Azure cloud services were introduced, including significant updates to Azure Arc for managing multi-cloud environments and the general availability of Azure Synapse Analytics for data warehousing and machine learning.
Custom AI Chips: In a move to reduce GPU dependency, Microsoft announced the Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt 100 CPU, which will power AI services like Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service.
Productivity and Collaboration Enhancements
Generative AI Tools: Microsoft unveiled Copilot for Azure, Copilot for Service, Copilot Studio, and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides, offering AI-driven assistance across various business functions.
Microsoft Teams: New features in Microsoft Teams include an AI-driven noise reduction feature and a "decorate your background" feature, which will tidy up your messy office.
Windows AI and Azure AI Speech
Windows AI Studio: This new toolkit allows developers to deploy generative AI models for local, offline use in Windows apps, integrating models like Meta’s Llama 2 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion XL.
Azure AI Speech: A tool capable of generating photorealistic avatars and animating them to speak, with restrictions in place to prevent misuse.
Broader Impact of AI
Jensen Huang's Prediction: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang joined the stage to discuss the profound impact of AI, which he believes will surpass the significance of the personal computer, mobile computing, and the internet. His speech underlined NVIDIA’s collaboration with Microsoft in advancing AI innovation and building new compute infrastructure in record time.
Bing Chat Rebranding
Copilot in Bing: And finally, Microsoft ignited Bing Chat, replacing it with Copilot in Bing, marking a significant shift in the company's strategy to compete in the AI chatbot space.
Our Take
Microsoft wants to be the Copilot company. Since Bing Chat didn’t disrupt search as much as Satya Nadella hoped it would, the rebrand to Copilot signifies the era of AI assistants accessible at the application level — so a native Copilot for every app instead of a website you go to. For enterprises, expect to pay extra for copilots — $30 extra per user. We’ll let you decide whether or not that’s worth it based on the user metrics Microsoft reported for Copilot:
70% said Copilot made them more productive
68% said Copilot improved the quality of their work
64% said Copilot helps them spend less time processing email
87% said Copilot makes it easier to get started on a first draft
75% said Copilot saves them time
77% said once they use Copilot, they don’t want to give it up
🔥 Rapid Fire
NVIDIA launches H200 Tensor Core GPU
Meta unveils Emu Video text-to-video model
Google DeepMind announces Lyria music generation model
GraphCast AI model forecasts the weather more accurately
Google scales multimodal understanding to long videos
AI-powered 3D sensor aims to transform computer vision
Dell and Hugging Face partner to simplify LLM deployment
Amazon introduces business version of home robot Astro
Alibaba Cloud unveils new AI innovations
Amdocs and NVIDIA partner to accelerate gen AI for telecom
OpenAI temporarily pauses new ChatGPT Plus signups
OpenAI confirms that GPT-5 is officially on the roadmap
Biden and Xi Jinping to sign deal keeping AI out of nuclear weapons
Pentagon is developing an AI error tracker
🎙️ The AI For All Podcast
This week’s episode featured Clare Stark, UN Coordination Officer at UNESCO, who discussed developing a global standard for AI ethics and the challenges around deepfakes, misinformation, and AI governance.
📖 What We’re Reading
This week’s handpicked content includes some defining of terms — the often grouped together MLOps and ModelOps. Plus, Retool has released their State of AI Report, compiling data from 1,500 professionals in tech.
Understanding the Difference Between MLOps and ModelOps (link)
“In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), two terms often come up: MLOps and ModelOps. While they may sound similar and are related to managing the lifecycle of machine learning models, they focus on different aspects of the process.”
Retool State of AI 2023 Report (link)
“Digging deeper, folks working close to the tech are using a breadth of AI tools to transform products, reimagine businesses and deliver customer experiences in ways previously unimaginable... Or, at least, that’s the promise. So what’s the real story? We surveyed over 1,500 tech people—software engineers, eng and business leaders, execs, product folks, designers, and more—in a variety of industries to find out.”