This week thousands of developers and tech leaders gathered in Seattle and online for Microsoft Build, the company’s flagship developer conference.
In his keynote address, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear: AI represents a platform shift akin to the arrival of the Internet. But what sets this era apart is the unprecedented pace of change; the rate of diffusion is entirely new. He recounted meeting a rural Indian farmer in 2023 who was using a service to reason over farming subsidies, built using an OpenAI foundation model that had been released just months earlier.
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott quantified this exponential diffusion in terms of compute, revealing that the company is now deploying up to 72,000 cutting-edge AI chips to its data centres every month. Their latest model training supercomputer is at least 10 times more powerful than the system used to train GPT-4. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Scott on stage, the message was unambiguous: we are nowhere near hitting the limits of what’s possible and the next big model will be a massive leap forward… “Everything you have in your imagination that is too expensive or too fragile right now… is going to become cheap and robust before you can even blink your eye,” Scott declared.
Microsoft is investing heavily to bring this compute and model power to developers and users. Their main user vehicle is “Copilot” – not a singular product, but an entire stack spanning cloud and edge, frameworks, and integration. Copilots are popping up everywhere, from dialling into your Teams calls to take notes, sharing your desktop, and across the Microsoft app ecosystem. In a recent Interview Mustafa Suleyman, the newly hired AI head at Redmond, said there are now about 135 live “Copilot surfaces” across the Microsoft portfolio, all added in the space of nine months! People can build their own custom Copilots too, using just prompts, drag-and-drop tools, or code, and Copilots will have extensions and connectors to let them work more closely with third party apps and provide unique functionality. In the coming months, these assistants won’t just respond to commands – they’ll soon work autonomously on your behalf, like a project manager or an HR colleague in the form of Copilot Agents. Being a Copilot wrangler may end up being one of the new jobs AI creates.
Microsoft also showcased new “Apple beating” hardware that can get the most from AI, with their new “Copilot+” laptops. These machines feature new chips, including a dedicated NPU for accelerating on-device processing, along with a suite of Windows-level optimizations. Everyday tasks like AI file search, content generation and image analysis will happen fast and offline, no cloud round trip required. The Phi-3 models we’ve mentioned before have been extended with vision and larger sizes and will power this on-device AI. Meanwhile in the cloud Microsoft will offer the latest GPT-4o, seen here flexing its multi-modal Minecraft playing skills.
More than any other firm today, Microsoft is provisioning the world’s access to AI (they stated that over 50,000 companies are using Azure OpenAI services). It is accelerating availability from cloud to edge, supporting consumers, and business users alike, and providing the compute for OpenAI to push forward the frontier. But for a Build conference, and despite news like the tie up with Devin the automated software agent, there wasn’t a huge amount to ensure developers are locked into the ecosystem. Plus, their complex dependency on OpenAI as the firm continues to make high profile governance missteps and to court Apple, means domination is not guaranteed.
Get all the Build details here.
Takeaways: Much of the news from the event is somewhat predictable; more compute, more models, more Copilots, more Azure etc. The development of AI optimised laptops could be one of the more interesting moves. While current high spec Apple mobile devices can run AI locally, it is not something the majority of people are thinking of doing. Microsoft’s new class of PCs will be relatively cheap and overtly AI enabled. You can pre-order now at places like Curry’s, entry level is the 13.8” Surface at £1049, prices will fall and they’ll go on display at your local retail park, and with slim formfactors and 15-20+ hour battery lives, they’ll likely get deployed to staff by most big companies. This could mean a new wave of AI awareness and adoption (assuming software can make compelling uses of this new intelligent hardware).