Last night, the greatest Windows of all time arrived

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Last night, the greatest Windows of all time arrived

Wan Chen May 24, 2023

abstract

On 2023 Build, Microsoft announced the AI service Copilot Family Bucket, with the most noteworthy being Windows Copilot.

The 2023 Microsoft Build is destined to be a year that goes down in history.

After ChatGPT sparked the AI craze, Microsoft has become one of the most important companies in this wave. Not only because it is a major shareholder of OpenAI, but also because it has launched NewBing, which is supported by AI.

More importantly, as the world's largest operating system service provider, the world's largest office software developer, and the world's second largest cloud service provider,Microsoft's trend has become the most important driving force and wind vane for the implementation of large models.

Microsoft CEO Nadella did not disappoint the waiting believers either.

Last night, at the beginning of the Build, he announced in a speech less than 30 minutes that Microsoft will bring over 50 AI related updates during the Build period, including 5 top priority products and service systems, including Windows, Office365, Copilot, Bing, Azure Cloud, and other Microsoft's most important products and service systems.

There is no need to change the name or mention 'Allin', Microsoft has demonstrated its determination to fully embrace AI through actions.

Copilot Family Bucket: A New Way of Working

Do you remember when the software wasn't connected to the internet? "Said Kevin Scott, Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer. A few years later, the same was true for software without a Copilot assistant.

In simple terms, Copilot is an AI component that embeds various software services. Based on AI and large language models, Copilot can assist users in completing all necessary cognitive tasks - from writing emails, code, promotional materials, to generating images and videos, developing work plans, or obtaining work and life advice.

About two years ago, Microsoft first introduced the concept of Copilot in GitHub. GitHubCopilot is an AI service that assists programmers in writing code.

This year, with the support of the big model, Copilot has undergone a comprehensive upgrade, which can solve more and more complex problems. Microsoft has also begun to embed Copilot in more core products and service centers.

At the Build conference, Microsoft announced further expansion plans for the Copilot ecosystem, including the launch of Dynamics365Copilot, Microsoft 365Copilot, and PowerPlatformCopilot.

Among them, PowerPages, an important component of the PowerPlatform platform, and Copilot in PowerBI enable public previews, allowing users to more freely create web pages and data insights through natural language. In addition, the generative intelligence in PowerVirtualAgent will also enable invited previews, further enhancing the experience of building dialogue robots and adding more customization possibilities for PowerAutomation.

Copilot is a completely new way of working, "said Jared Spataro, the head of Microsoft 365." It works with you and is embedded in programs that millions of people use every day: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and so on

Windows 11: AI is here

Among the numerous Copilot buckets announced on Build, the most significant one is the arrival of Windows Copilot, which means that the most advanced AI will enter the core system of Windows as a fundamental software service.

The new Windows Copilot tool will be located in the bottom sidebar of Windows 11- just like the new Bing AI chat feature, users can enter questions in Copilot and use it as a question and answer search engine.

On the surface, Windows Copilot looks like a conversational AI robot or text generation tool similar to ChatGPT or NewBing.But Windows Copilt, which is deeply integrated with Windows,It can call other Windows components, which means it has the potential to become a stronger personal PC intelligent assistant than Siri or Microsoft's Xiaobing and Xiaona.

Four usage scenarios of Windows Copilot were demonstrated on-site.

Adjust the personalized settings of the PC, such as turning on night mode.

Assist in processing documents, explaining, rewriting, or summarizing to improve work efficiency.

Control the app, such as asking it to recommend music, and then open the music software according to the user's selection and play the corresponding playlist.

There is also auxiliary creative work to generate a promotional image according to your requirements and send it to the working group in the chat software.

In fact, similar functions for handling voice or text commands have been attempted on other intelligent assistants in the past, including Microsoft's own Xiaona, Apple's Siri, and Amazon and Alibaba's intelligent speakers, but objectively speaking, the results are disappointing.

Microsoft Copilot does not fundamentally change the soup, but the powerful reasoning ability of the big language model may be a good medicine to fill the gaps in the ability of intelligent assistants. In the past, the ability of intelligent assistants to handle affairs was only at the level of a few year old child, and at least from the ability demonstrated by ChatGPT, it is no longer weak or even stronger in many aspects than ordinary adults.

Windows Copilot is expected to provide a preview version starting in June, let's wait and see.

Bing - ChatGPT's default search engine

Nadella revealed in his speech that Bing will also have some new changes.OpenAI will begin using Bing as the default search engine for ChatGPT, providing real-time retrieval of answers and including references.

This feature will be launched today for ChatGPTPlus users and will soon be enabled for all free ChatGPT users.

It is worth noting that ChatGPT will notify users that Bing has been used when calling Bing to answer questions. Bringing Bing with ChatGPT traffic seems to help Bing's brand.

More importantly, Bing has gained more usage through ChatGPT to improve its answers, and may also have a greater chance of winning the default choice of built-in browsers - becoming the default search engine in Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari browsers.

AzureAIStudio

Not only does Microsoft provide comprehensive Copilots, but now it also provides services on how to create Copilots. Nadella said, "We have built all of these copilots using a universal architecture stack. Now, we want to make it available so that everyone can build their own copilots for their applications, from AI infrastructure to basic models to AI orchestration, all the way to copilots and their scalability

AzureAIStudio Azure OpenAI AI copilot

AzureAIStudio AzureOpenAI Azure Semantic Kernel

For the AzureAI series of releases that help developers lower their barriers, security is a keyword repeatedly mentioned by Microsoft. Among them, AzureAIContentSafety can help developers build safer online environments and communities, with its built-in model that can detect inappropriate content in text or images and notify human supervisors to take action.

Additionally, in the Azure Machine Learning tool, there is a feature called ResponsibleAIdashboardsupport for text and imagedata. This function enables developers to evaluate large models built with unstructured data in the stage of building, training or evaluating models. This will help developers find model errors, fairness problems, and model interpretation before deploying models, so as to achieve a more equitable high-performance computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) model.

Key to Targeting Next Generation AI Applications - Data

As a completely new product at the Build Conference, Microsoft has focused on the data layer of the next generation AI applications and released an end-to-end data analysis product - Microsoft Fabric. Nadella stated that this may be the largest data product launched by Microsoft since SQL Server.

The core of Microsoft Fabric is' unity ', which brings together all the required data and analysis tools with one product, one experience, one architecture, and one business model, including data engineering, data integration, data warehousing, data science, real-time analysis, application observability, and business intelligence, all connected to a data repository called OneLake.

In addition, with the help of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, customers can use session language to create data streams and pipelines, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results. Customers can even create their own conversation language experience, combine the Azure OpenAI service model and its data, and publish it as a plugin.

Arun Ulagaratchagan, Vice President of AzureData, explained, "As we enter a new era defined by AI, data becomes more important. To provide power for specific AI experiences, it is necessary to continuously provide clean data from well managed and highly integrated analysis systems. In the past, running different services together required a high 'integration tax'. Meanwhile, Microsoft Fabric enables developers to leverage generative AI to gain insights into their data.

AIPlugin ecosystem

If Copilot has opened up a new way of human-computer interaction in the era of large models, then plugins are a necessary part of expanding Copilot's capabilities. In fact, following the launch of the ChatGPT plugin by OpenAI in March, Microsoft also announced the Bing plugin earlier this month. For example, plugins allow ChatGPT and Bing to chat using the OpenTable plugin to find and book restaurants.

At today's Build Conference for Developers, Microsoft announced the adoption of the same open plug-in standard as OpenAIChatGPT, so as to ensure interoperability between ChatGPT and a series of Microsoft's copilot products and services in the future.

This means that plugins developed by developers using any platform are applicable to both ChatGPT and Microsoft's Microsoft 365, Dynamics365Copilot, and other services to meet the business needs of both individual and commercial customers. AI applications developed by developers on Azure OpenAI Enterprise Edition services also default to supporting the same open plugin standard - which means that any developer can choose to interact using human natural language as their software's interaction method.

And developers can now integrate their applications and services into Microsoft 365 Copilot using plugins. Microsoft 365 Copilot can also be extended by bringing their data into Microsoft Graph, using the recently announced Copilot semantic index to elevate and manipulate relevant and actionable information.

In this demonstration, Copilot in Teams software can retrieve information and generate key points in various places such as emails, websites, and local databases by calling plugin software. It can also further call other plugins to generate work orders and distribute them to corresponding people. Through plug-in calls, Copilot implements the steps of deep retrieval and executing content generation.

In addition, Bing is increasing support for plugins. In addition to the previously announced OpenTable and WolframAlpha, it will also have numerous products in the ecosystem, including Expedia, Instaart, Kayak, Klarna, Redfin, TripAdvisor, and Zillow.

ending

In the past few months, amidst the wave of 'AI devouring software', some software entrepreneurs have stated that they are not OpenAI, but rather Microsoft. Whether it's engineering capabilities or execution capabilities, Build 2023 has once again "refreshed" Microsoft's 48 year history.

Reaching the forefront once again is the leader's posture - Copilot, plugin ecosystem, exploring AI interaction in PC, Microsoft has targeted the interaction entrance of the big model era.

In the past, whether it was the Windows operating system and Office in the PC era, or the intelligent cloud and online office software gradually catching up in the mobile internet era, Microsoft has always been a follower's posture. But Microsoft, which has entered the era of big models, has enabled new businesses to lead the industry on one hand and revitalized old businesses on the other. But as Nadella's opening words, from PC to iPhone, and then to the cloud, all of these will be a continuous journey.

Microsoft Build2023