New Delhi: Microsoft Corp on Thursday trumpeted its latest plans to put artificial intelligence in the hands of more users, responding to a blowback from rival Google unveiled this week with an upgrade to its own widely used Office software. Did. The technology company previewed a new AI “copilot” for Microsoft 365, its product suite that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook email. First open to some 20 enterprises for testing, AI will introduce a draft into these applications, speeding up content creation and freeing up workers’ time, Microsoft said.
Beating peers through investment in OpenAI, the Redmond, Washington-based company, the makers of ChatGPT, also showed off a new “business chat” experience that can pull data and perform tasks across applications at a user’s written command.
“We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity enhancements,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an online presentation.
Microsoft’s share price rose nearly 4% on the news.
This week’s flurry of developments, including new funding for AI startup Adept, shows how companies large and small are locked in a fierce competition to deploy software that could reshape the way people work.
At the center are Microsoft and Google-owner Alphabet Inc, which on Tuesday used AI features for Gmail and a “magic wand” to draft prose in its own word processor. The capabilities that Microsoft and Google showed off are similar.
The craze for investing in and building new products started last year with the launch of ChatGPT, the chatbot sensation that showed the public the potential of so-called big language models.
Such technology learns from past data how to create fresh content. It has developed rapidly. This week, OpenAI began releasing a more powerful version known as GPT-4. Microsoft said it partially outfitted Microsoft’s CoPilot features with the older GPT-3.5 model, business and application data.
RBC analyst Rishi Jaluria said new capabilities offered through Microsoft’s cloud are poised to attract business and slow revenue growth.
Jaluria said, Copilot “will make more use of Microsoft Office and increase separation versus competitors.”
taking notes for you
The company’s biggest update on Thursday was in Excel. Microsoft said AI could open up the computational wizardry of its spreadsheet software, long the domain of trained analysts, to anyone able to describe a calculation they want in plain text. Similar to the Live Notes that Google showed reporters this week, Microsoft said its Copilot can summarize virtual meetings as they happen in its Teams collaboration software.
In an interview, John Friedman, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, demonstrated this capability. Co-Pilot generated bullet points summarizing questions asked by Reuters, including whether Microsoft could roll out this technology profitably.
Large language models require a lot of computing power and cost to run. Friedman said that Microsoft will make the job of deployment financially easier. Co-Pilot summarized its answer during the interview: “Microsoft is working on reducing costs and increasing the speed and fidelity of the models, but did not disclose pricing or fatigue of the Co-Pilot system.” (It was meant to say “tearing”.)
To fine-tune the technology and ensure its answers are factual, Friedman said Microsoft is testing Copilot with a few customers ahead of a wider rollout. “One of the surprising things about large language models is that they are very self-confident, and they make mistakes,” Friedman said.
Friedman pointed to Microsoft’s business chat experience as the biggest development on Thursday because it can handle tasks across applications. For example, a user can ask, “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and the AI will take cues from the morning’s emails, meetings and chat threads, Microsoft said.
In the long run, Friedman said, the vision is a more personalized AI. “We often adapt people to the machines and systems we build,” Friedman said. “It’s something that will start to adapt to you.”