Amber Hickman |
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared plans to introduce 100 new updates to the Copilot stack in his keynote speech at Microsoft Ignite 2023.
The updates are focused on enhancing every layer of the Microsoft Copilot stack to help organisations adopt artificial intelligence in what Nadella calls ‘the age of Copilot’.
“From digital natives like Airbnb or Duolingo to Shopify, as well as the world’s largest company, whether it’s BT or Bayer or Dentsu, Goodyear or Lumen, they are all the deploying the Microsoft Copilot, to companies in every industry who are building their own copilot, from LSEG in finance to Epic in healthcare, to Rockwell Automation in manufacturing and Siemens in manufacturing,” said Nadella. “It’s fantastic to see people deploy their own copilot.”
First, Microsoft unveiled two custom-designed chips that will help meet the demand for AI. The Microsoft Azure Maia AI Accelerator is optimised for generative AI and is currently being tested with the GitHub Copilot, whilst the Microsoft Azure Cobalt CPU is an Arm-based processor designed to run general purpose compute workloads on the Microsoft Cloud. The chips will roll out to Microsoft data centres in early 2024.
Nadella also announced the general availability of Azure Boost, a new system that offloads server virtualisation process onto purpose-built software and hardware. This improves networking and local storage to boost Azure performance.
He also shared how Microsoft is continuing to partner with NVIDIA and AMD to improve cloud computing with Azure. Microsoft is adding NVIDIA’s latest GPU AI accelerator, H200, to its fleet to support larger models. Meanwhile, AMD’s MI300X AI accelerator is coming to Azure to provide Microsoft with more choice for AI-optimised virtual machines.
In addition, Microsoft is making a series of updates aimed at improving the Azure OpenAI service and open-source models. First, the latest GPT-4 updates, GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, are coming to Azure OpenAI services. Furthermore, Microsoft is expanding its partnership with Meta to bring the Llama 2 model to Azure, which will allow users to add their own data to help the model understand their domain better and generate more accurate predictions.
Microsoft is also launching Copilot Studio and Copilot for Service. Copilot Studio is a new application that will enable users to build custom GPTs, create new plug-ins, monitor Copilot performance and more, whilst Copilot for Service will help customer service agents resolve cases quicker.
“Our vision is pretty straightforward,” said Nadella. “We are the Copilot company. We believe in a future where there will be a copilot for everyone and everything you do. Microsoft Copilot is that one experience that runs across all our surfaces, understanding your context on the web, on your device. And when you’re at work, bringing the right skills to you when you need them.”