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Hello readers,
Welcome to another edition of This Week in the Future! Microsoft held their annual Build event for developers and announced, you guessed it, AI stuff. Plus, new Copilot+ PCs that seriously compete with MacBooks and always watch your screen.
Let’s get into it!
Microsoft Build 2024
Microsoft held their annual Build event for developers and unveiled what they believe to be breakthroughs in AI development and hardware. We’ve got new developer tools, frontier models, partnerships, and hints at GPT-5. Here’s everything announced:
Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric provides a SaaS solution for acting on high-volume, time-sensitive granular data to make faster and better business decisions.
GitHub Copilot extensions will allow developers to customize their Copilot experience. With the Azure extension, developers can manage Azure resources, troubleshoot issues, and locate logs and code — all in natural language using Copilot Chat.
Phi-3-vision is a new multimodal small language model now available on Azure. OpenAI’s GPT-4o is also available in Azure AI Studio and as an API.
Team Copilot is an expansion of Copilot for Microsoft 365 intended to make Copilot a more active participant in team workflows. Microsoft Copilot Studio is also adding agent capabilities for making more active and integrated custom Copilots.
New virtual machines available to cloud customers built on AMD’s MI300X AI chip and Microsoft’s own Azure Cobalt 100 processor optimized for AI workloads.
Microsoft announced new partnerships:
Khan Academy will use Phi-3 (trained on textbook-quality data) to improve math tutoring. Microsoft is donating AI-optimized Azure infrastructure to make Khanmigo for Teachers freely available.
Cognition’s autonomous software agent Devin (which we covered here) will be brought to customers and be powered by Azure under the partnership.
Hugging Face expanded its cloud collaboration and added new open source models with direct, 1-click deployment from Azure AI Studio.
Copilot+ PCs
AI has emboldened Microsoft to seriously compete with the MacBook Pro with the introduction of Copilot+ PCs. These AI-first devices utilize a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip (which now has a dev kit) for fast, on-device AI. One notable feature is Recall, where Copilot is constantly taking snapshots of your screen, so that you can ask it where something was on your PC. Microsoft says the screenshots never leave your device.
Our Take
While Microsoft ingratiating itself with developers and constantly innovating is great and all, the real announcement was only hinted at — Microsoft is building GPT-5. Microsoft placed emphasis on scaling laws, alluding to the scaling hypothesis (more data and compute = AGI). Sam Altman even made an appearance to reaffirm that GPT-5 will be much smarter. Whether the scaling hypothesis holds indefinitely remains to be seen.
🔥 Rapid Fire
AI companies make safety promises at Seoul summit
Google DeepMind introduces the Frontier Safety Framework
Anthropic reflects on its responsible scaling policy
Anthropic makes safety breakthrough in decoding the AI black box
OpenAI clarifies safety approach amidst AI Seoul Summit
OpenAI dissolves safety team after departure of key researchers
OpenAI and News Corp partner to bring news content to ChatGPT
OpenAI denies imitating Scarlett Johansson, removes Sky voice
OpenAI improves data analysis feature in ChatGPT
Cohere introduces Aya, a family of open multilingual models
Meta introduces Chameleon, a novel mixed-modal model
Google shows ads in AI Overviews and releases new AI tools
Trust in AI is key to driving ROI in new Salesforce report
IBM unveils next chapter of watsonx and open source models
Dell Technologies expands Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA
Qualcomm AI Hub expands to on-device AI apps for PCs
Kyndryl and NVIDIA team to accelerate generative AI adoption
AWS plans to invest 15.7 billion euros in Spain for AI
Google invests 1 billion euros into Finnish data center for AI
European Union gives final green light on AI Act
Britain expands AI Safety Institute to San Francisco
FCC proposes AI disclosure for political advertising
Pentagon seeks public comment on defense adoption of AI
Big Brother: China rolls out LLM based on Xi Jinping
Inflection announces new team and product strategy
Retool announces AWS integration for building AI applications
Humane, maker of Ai Pin, looks to sell company
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