Microsoft announced a number of new artificial intelligence features and developer tools at its annual Build conference on Tuesday (May 21), highlighting the company's commitment to AI across its product lines.
“We're riding an incredible platform wave,” said Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technology officer and executive vice president of AI, likening AI's transformative potential to the rise of the personal computer and broadband internet. “We're not even close to seeing how powerful AI models can be.”
Scott also highlighted the importance of OpenAI's latest language model, GPT-4o, which powers many of Microsoft's new AI capabilities. “Calls to GPT-4o are 12 times cheaper than the original model,” he said. “His time to respond is also six times faster.” While these increased speeds and lower costs are critical to the widespread adoption of AI, Scott believes this is just the beginning. I am. “Over time, things will become cheaper and more robust,” he said.
Copilot Plus PC is equipped with AI capabilities
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the event by highlighting the company's recent advances in AI, including the launch of the new Arm-powered “Copilot Plus PC” with advanced AI capabilities built directly into Windows 11. These devices leverage Microsoft's new Windows Copilot runtime. Contains over 40 AI models. “Windows is the most open platform for AI,” said Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows and Surface at Microsoft.
Nathaniel Whitmore, CEO of AI education company SuperIntelligent, told PYMNTS that the new AI PC is a huge step forward.
“For anyone wondering if 'AI PC' is going to be more than just a keyboard button to summon a chatbot, Microsoft has answered with a resounding 'yes,'” Whitmore said. He noted that the Microsoft Build event quickly gained attention on social media platforms such as his AI Twitter and X, primarily focused on a new AI-powered PC he called Copilot+ PC.
Whitmore highlighted two important characteristics that stood out to him. First, the integrated assistant is built natively into Windows and can observe and interact with the user's screen, similar to the recently released ChatGPT desktop exclusively for Mac. Second, the recall feature allows Copilot to search all local user interactions, essentially creating a photographic memory of everything a user does on their computer. Whittemore emphasized that all data processing is done locally and no information is sent to the cloud or used for training purposes.
“If this continues, it won't be long before it feels strange to be using a computer when you can't see the screen or be told what you're doing,” Whitmore predicted.
The Windows Copilot Runtime is a key component of Microsoft's AI strategy, providing developers with a library of APIs to integrate AI capabilities into their apps. “The Windows Copilot Library consists of ready-to-use AI APIs, including Studio Effects, Live Captions Translations, OCR, Recall with User Activity and Phi Silica, and will be available to developers in June,” Davuluri said.
With minimal coding, developers can use the Windows Copilot library to incorporate features like background blur, eye contact, and AI translation into their apps. For example, Meta is adding Windows Studio effects to WhatsApp to enhance video calling capabilities.
Microsoft also announced a Recall AI feature that enables Copilot Plus PC to document and store user activity for easy search and memory recall. The feature is made possible by the Windows Semantic Index, which stores data locally. “We're making this available to developers with the Vector Embeddings API so they can build their own vector stores and RAGs within their applications and with application data,” Davuluri said.
Developers can further enhance recall capabilities by adding app context information to the database, improving app engagement and user flow between Windows and apps.
These Windows improvements for developers lay the foundation for more AI-powered apps on Arm-powered systems and upcoming NPUs from AMD and Intel.
partnership
Microsoft also announced partnerships and tools to bring AI to more developers and users. The company has partnered with the nonprofit Khan Academy to provide free AI-powered tutoring tools to all educators in the United States.
GitHub Copilot, the company's AI-powered coding tool, currently boasts 1.8 million paid subscribers. Microsoft announced the release of the GitHub Copilot extension, which allows you to further extend your service.
The tech giant also introduced AI enhancements to its productivity tools, including the Team Copilot AI assistant that can manage meeting agendas, coordinate long team chats, assign tasks, and track deadlines in Microsoft Planner. Other improvements include the ability to paste source code within Teams with syntax formatting, co-authoring with Loops, improved keyboard shortcuts, custom emojis, and more.
AI competition is heating up
Microsoft's AI push comes at a pivotal time for the tech industry as companies race to integrate generative AI capabilities into their products and services. The announcement at Build demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to staying at the forefront of this rapidly evolving field, leveraging partnerships with OpenAI and other leading companies.
But the company faces stiff competition from rivals like Google, which recently announced its own AI-powered tools and services at the I/O Developers Conference.
The success of Microsoft's AI strategy will largely depend on developers adopting the company's tools and platform. The company aims to make it easy for developers to create their AI-powered apps and experiences on Windows by providing a comprehensive suite of APIs, frameworks, and pre-built models. Masu. Still, it's up to developers to build on this foundation and create compelling use cases for AI in everyday computing.
