GLOSSARY: Microsoft Hits Tech Century as Kohli Creates History

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TAUSIF ALAM & AMIT RAJA NAIK

Thursday, Nov 16, 2023 | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here

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Virat Kohli scripted history by scoring his 50th century during the ICC ODI World Cup semifinals (IND vs NZ), surpassing cricket god Sachin Tendulkar.

Simultaneously, at the Ignite 2023 conference, Microsoft made history by announcing over 100 new updates, hitting a 'tech century'. The excitement was palpable even for Satya Nadella, who remarked, “Little did we know when we scheduled Ignite that we would schedule it on the same day… It just finished five minutes ago, and was a short version of the game,” highlighting the unexpected coincidence with the cricket milestone.

Microsoft’s obsession with the word ‘Copilot’ took an unexpected turn as it renamed its search engine-based AI chatbot Bing Chat to – you guessed it – ‘Copilot’, creating a unified Copilot experience for consumers, as well as enterprises. This also could have been done to differentiate itself from ChatGPT and Google Bard, positioning itself as a productivity tool for both personal as well as professional purposes, rather than just experimentation or conversing platform with the web.

Microsoft mentioned the word ‘Copilot’ at least 250+ times throughout the conference, alongside announcing some interesting new updates and partnerships.

Some of the exciting partnerships include AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, Meta, Mistral AI, and G42, alongside the launch of Microsoft Azure Maia and Microsoft Azure Cobalt, giving customers more choice in price and performance to meet their needs for cloud and AI workloads.

Microsoft also unveiled Phi-2, a transformer model with 2.7 billion parameters that shows significant improvement in reasoning capabilities and safety measures compared to Phi-1.5. It also highlighted model-as-a-service, a new feature in the model catalog which was announced at Microsoft Build in May this year, allowing developers to easily integrate the latest AI models, including Llama 2 from Meta, Jais from G42, the upcoming premium model from Mistral and others.

Citing OpenAI GPTs launch last week, Nadella mentioned that users will now be able to use both plugins and GPTs. “No two business processes, no two companies are going to be the same,” he said, unveiling Copilot Studio, where users can now build custom GPTs, create new plugins, orchestrate workflows and much more. SAP, Workday, and ServiceNow are some of its early customers.

Check out all the announcements made at Microsoft Ignite here.

Not a Good Time to be a Tech Entrepreneur

According to a recent report, private engineering institutes have reported a 50-70% drop in placements this year. Major Indian IT companies have put a freeze on hiring. Many of them have a huge bench size. The companies believe they need a lot more training for the existing employees, before they can hire new ones.

“I know this is not very exciting advice, but stick to your job,” said Varun Mayya, one of the influential voices in the field of AI, in his latest video, urging aspiring entrepreneurs to reassess their decision since the time is not ripe.

Read the full story here.

Salesforce’s GenAI Innovations

At OpenAI’s first-ever developer conference, DevDay 2023, chief Sam Altman revealed that the company has about 2 million developers building on their API for a wide variety of use cases, and over 92% of Fortune 500 companies built on their products.

Salesforce was one of the early adopters of OpenAI’s APIs that built Einstein GPT to enhance its customer experience, specifically for CRM applications. It has nearly been eight months since its launch. AIM reached out to Salesforce senior director of solution engineering Sridhar H to understand its impact in the enterprise ecosystem, alongside use cases, and roadmap.

Check out the complete interview here.

Google is all About Real World Impact

After introducing GraphCast in December 2022, Google DeepMind has finally launched the open-source AI weather forecasting model this week. It claims to provide unparalleled accuracy and speed in predicting global weather conditions up to 10 days in advance.

While Google has been heavily criticised for unknowingly outsourcing its tech and talent to other companies (the likes of OpenAI, etc.), it is taking a different approach by actively working towards building AI models that directly impact human lives in areas such as healthcare, shopping, climate, pollution, and more.

Learn how Google is making the world a better place, one model at a time, here.