Microsoft

Microsoft AI Tech

Microsoft Unveils Face Check Facial Recognition to Enable Secure Enterprise Identity Verification

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Chris McKay• February 6, 2024 • 1 min read

The new Face Check feature provides real-time facial matching between a user's selfie and the photo on their identity document, such as a passport or driver's license.

Microsoft Education

How Microsoft is Helping Educators Use AI to Unlock Productivity and Personalize Learning

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Chris McKay• January 18, 2024 • 4 min read

New updates include expanded availability of Microsoft Copilot, Loop, and Reading Coach, alongside initiatives to improve AI literacy and online safety.

Microsoft Biotech & Health

AI Speeds Up Hunt for New Infectious Disease Treatments

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Chris McKay• January 16, 2024 • 2 min read

Researchers successfully used generative AI and foundation models to design several small molecule inhibitors for essential target proteins of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and coronaviruses.

Microsoft

Microsoft Launches Copilot Pro

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Chris McKay• January 15, 2024 • 2 min read

Designed for power users, creators, and those striving for enhanced productivity, Copilot Pro is a premium subscription that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365, offering an advanced AI experience.

Microsoft Typeface Marketing

Microsoft and Typeface's New Integration Preview the Future of Retail Marketing

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Chris McKay• January 11, 2024 • 2 min read

The new Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights promise to revamp how marketers manage and maintain projects and campaigns.

Microsoft OpenAI AI Policy

EU Investigates Microsoft's OpenAI Investment for Potential Merger Regulation Implications

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Chris McKay• January 9, 2024 • 2 min read

This scrutiny by the EU Commission follows similar concerns raised by the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority and reportedly the U.S. Federal Trade Commission

Microsoft

Microsoft Launches Dedicated Copilot App for Android and iOS

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Richard Banfield• December 28, 2023 • 2 min read

Notably, while access to GPT-4 currently requires a paid subscription through OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's new Android app grants free access.

OpenAI Microsoft

The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft for Copyright Infringement Over Use of Articles to Train AI Models

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Chris McKay• December 27, 2023 • 2 min read

The suit claims that millions of the newspaper's articles were used without permission to train AI chatbots, directly competing with The Times as a reliable information source.

Microsoft Media & Entertainment

Microsoft Copilot Now Lets You Create Full Songs With Lyrics, Instrumentals, and Voices

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Chris McKay• December 19, 2023 • 2 min read

This simplicity allows anyone to explore their musical ideas, using Copilot and Suno as creative partner. Songs can be made just for fun or perhaps even polished into compelling works.

Microsoft

Microsoft Shares New Prompting Techniques to Push the Boundaries of Frontier AI Models

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Chris McKay• December 12, 2023 • 3 min read

By modifying an approach called Medprompt, originally designed for medical questions, the team attained the highest MMLU score ever recorded - 90.10%.

Microsoft

Microsoft Releases Phi-2: A Surprisingly Powerful 2.7B Parameter Language Model

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Chris McKay• December 12, 2023 • 2 min read

Phi-2 matches or exceeds far larger models like the 7B Mistral, 13B Llama-2, and even 70B Llama-2 on select benchmarks.

Microsoft

Microsoft Unveils “Deep Search” to Deliver More Relevant Answers in Bing

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Chris McKay• December 5, 2023 • 2 min read

According to Microsoft, Deep Search addresses a common pain point in search: when users have specific, nuanced questions, typical search engines often fail to fully understand the ask or return adequate answers.

Microsoft Research Accessibility

Microsoft Researchers Advance Sign Language Accessibility Through Community-Sourced Data

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Chris McKay• December 4, 2023 • 2 min read

This approach aims to remedy the limitations of previous datasets that were either scraped from the internet without consent or recorded in labs, lacking diversity and real-world applicability.

Microsoft

Microsoft's Bing Chat is now Copilot

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Chris McKay• December 1, 2023 • 1 min read

The company first launched Bing Chat in preview in February and has continuously added capabilities since.

OpenAI Microsoft

Microsoft to Gain Insight into OpenAI Governance With Non-Voting Board Seat

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Chris McKay• November 30, 2023 • 6 min read

The observer seat grants Microsoft visibility into board meetings while the nonprofit board maintains authority over the for-profit AI research subsidiary.

Microsoft Open Source Research

Microsoft Releases New Orca 2 Small Language Model with Enhanced Reasoning Capabilities

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Chris McKay• November 20, 2023 • 2 min read

Comprehensive benchmarks show Orca 2 significantly outperforming other models of equivalent size on metrics related to language understanding, common sense reasoning, multi-step math problems, reading comprehension, summarization, and more.

Microsoft

Microsoft Will Allow Businesses to Create Photorealistic AI-Powered Digital Avatar

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Chris McKay• November 16, 2023 • 2 min read

Users can upload a few images and video samples of a person to train a custom avatar. The AI system precisely replicates vocal intonations and lip movements to match the individual's voice and likeness with remarkable fidelity.

Microsoft

Microsoft Unveils Azure Maia 100 and Cobalt 100 Chips: Custom Silicon for AI and Cloud Workloads

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Chris McKay• November 16, 2023 • 3 min read

This vertical integration allows Microsoft cloud to run most efficiently while giving customers more infrastructure choice.

Microsoft Fintech

Ramp Announces Microsoft Copilot Integration and Tools to Streamline Financial Operations with AI

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Chris McKay• November 15, 2023 • 1 min read

Microsoft Team users can now use Copilot to analyze spend patterns, set real-time alerts, and take actions like issuing new cards by using natural language.

Microsoft

Microsoft Unveils Windows AI Studio to Streamline AI Development on Windows

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Chris McKay• November 15, 2023 • 2 min read

A key goal of Windows AI Studio is to simplify the process of developing generative AI applications. The studio provides an end-to-end guided workspace with tools for customizing and fine-tuning small language models on developers' own data.

Microsoft

Microsoft Unveils Copilot Studio, a Low-Code Tool for Businesses to Customize and Build Their Own AI Assistants

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Chris McKay• November 15, 2023 • 2 min read

The suite allows users to easily tailor Copilot for Microsoft 365 to their unique enterprise scenarios, quickly develop, test, and publish both standalone copilots and custom GPTs, and effectively manage and secure these customizations with appropriate access, data, user controls, and analytics.

Microsoft GitHub

GitHub Brings Copilot Chat to Web and Mobile Platforms

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Chris McKay• November 8, 2023 • 1 min read

These integrations aim to make Copilot available throughout the software development lifecycle.

Microsoft GitHub

GitHub Copilot Chat Coming in December with Powerful New Capabilities

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Chris McKay• November 8, 2023 • 1 min read

The new features aim to boost productivity, offering an unprecedented level of AI-powered support in the coding process.

Microsoft AI Policy AI Ethics

Microsoft Announces New Steps to Combat AI-Enabled Misinformation Ahead of Major Elections

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Chris McKay• November 8, 2023 • 2 min read

Through multi-pronged steps like content authentication and partnerships, Microsoft aims to promote secure and trustworthy elections.