Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) on Thursday announced its latest ambitions to put artificial intelligence in the hands of more consumers, responding to Google’s (GOOGL.O) flurry of announcements this week with updates to its widely used office software.
The technology corporation showcased a new artificial intelligence (AI) “Copilot” for Microsoft 365, its suite of products that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and Outlook communications. Microsoft stated that AI will give a prototype in various applications, therefore accelerating the generation of content and freeing up workers’ time.
The Redmond, Washington-based company demonstrated a new “business chat” experience that can collect data and do activities across apps in response to a user’s typed order.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated in an online presentation, “We believe the next generation of artificial intelligence will unleash a new wave of productivity growth.”
The announcement caused Microsoft’s share price to increase by around 4%.
This week’s flurry of news, including new financing for artificial intelligence (AI) firm Adept, demonstrates how large and small businesses are embroiled in a tight struggle to implement software that might transform the way people work.
Microsoft and Alphabet Inc., which owns Google and boasted AI tools for Gmail and a “magic wand” to generate prose in its own word processor on Tuesday, are at the center. Microsoft and Google shown skills that are comparable.
The desire to invest in and develop new products began with the introduction of ChatGPT, the chatbot phenomenon that demonstrated the promise of so-called big language models, the previous year.
This system learns from historical data how to generate fresh content. It has swiftly developed. This week, OpenAI initiated the distribution of GPT-4, a more potent version. Microsoft stated that this, together with an earlier GPT-3.5 model, business and application data, supports the Copilot functionalities.
Rishi Jaluria, an analyst at RBC, stated that the new capabilities given by Microsoft’s cloud are positioned to attract business and reverse declining revenue growth.
The Copilot will “promote more adoption of Microsoft Office and boost the company’s differentiation from competitors,” according to Jaluria.
NOTETAKING FOR YOU
Excel was one of the company’s most significant releases on Thursday.
Microsoft claims that AI can make the computational magic of its spreadsheet software, which was previously reserved for professional analysts, accessible to anybody who can express a calculation in plain English.
Similar to the live notes that Google demonstrated to reporters this week, Microsoft’s Copilot can summarize ongoing virtual sessions within the Teams collaboration platform, the company claimed.
Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Jon Friedman, showed this capacity in an interview. The Copilot created bullet points summarizing topics posed by Reuters, such as whether Microsoft can commercially implement the technology.
Operating large language models requires a great deal of computational power and money.
Microsoft, according to Friedman, will make the implementation cost-effective.
During the interview, the Copilot summarized his response as follows: “Microsoft is working on reducing the cost and boosting the speed and quality of the models, but did not divulge the copilot system’s pricing or maintenance requirements.” (It should have read “tiering.”)
Friedman stated that Microsoft is testing Copilot with a subset of consumers in order to fine-tune the technology and ensure that its responses are factual. Friedman noted, “it’s astonishing that enormous language models are so confident, but they make mistakes.”
Since it can perform activities across apps, Microsoft’s corporate chat experience was cited by Friedman as the most significant advancement on Thursday. For example, a user may ask, “Tell my team how we revised the product strategy,” and the AI will draw cues from emails, meetings, and chat threads from the morning, according to Microsoft.
Friedman stated that the vision for the future is a more customized AI.
“We frequently force individuals to conform to the technology and systems we’ve created,” remarked Friedman. This item will begin to adapt to your needs.