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Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella said the ultimate purpose of artificial intelligence is to increase accessibility, during his Build 2024 keynote speech on Tuesday.
The tech titan appears to be accomplishing this when it revealed GitHub Copilot Workspace, which will allow any novice, with seemingly little to no knowledge of programming languages, to develop their own software.
“Any person can go from idea to code in an instant,” Nadella said. “Every point in this process, you are in control … It is bringing a lot of fun and joy back to coding.”
Microsoft plans to make this more available in the coming months.
“Going back to the beginning of modern computing, say 70 years ago, there have been two dreams we have had,” Nadella said. “Can computers understand us? Can computers help us reason, plan and act accordingly? Here we are.”
Nadella also discussed Microsoft’s AI infrastructure, which he believes is the best on the planet.
“Azure has more than 60 datacenter regions,” he added. “Our best in class AI infrastructure is available everywhere. We are on track to have our datacenters powered 100% by renewable energy next year.”
Nadella detailed the importance of Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) in providing the hardware that propels Azure AI, which is currently being utilized by more than 50,000 organizations.
As of today, OpenAI’s GPT-4o is generally available through Azure AI. Azure AI is also adding new language models regularly, including lightweight models from its partner Hugging FFace.
“We are leading the small language revolution,” Nadella said.
Microsoft is also releasing new Phi-3 models, such as Phi-3-Vision that can generate insights from images. Phi-3-small and Phi-3-medium will help users build apps.
What’s more, Azure AI Studio provides a complete tool chain for building AI models. It is now generally available.
Microsoft Fabric has also been updated.
“It is everything you need for a SaaS platform,” Nadella said. “It works with data anywhere. Today, we are introducing Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end solution to finding insights from data across your entire organization and across clouds.”
In total, Microsoft revealed about 50 updates or new products during the opening event at its Build 2024 developer conference in Seattle. It continues through Thursday.
The proliferation of AI-powered products has accelerated this spring. Last week, Google (GOOG)(GOOGL) announced the “Gemini era” during its annual I/O conference. OpenAI revealed its GPT-4o model last week as well. And next month, Apple (AAPL) will be expected to make some AI announcements during its WWDC event.
