Microsoft Build 2021: Keynote highlights and updates on AI, Windows, and Office improvements

The opening keynote of the thirteenth annual Build developer conference will start at 6 p.m. Every year, Microsoft reveals interesting news for application creators, but along with that we also learn about practical improvements for Windows, Office and other software for ordinary mortals.

This year’s Build will most certainly revolve around artificial intelligence, because Microsoft doesn’t talk about anything else for half a year. First Last benefits from cooperation with OpenAI and integrates its GPT-4 language model into all conceivable products. It will soon head to the Office suite, there is talk of closer integration with Windows. But the company can also surprise with other news.

The live broadcast is scheduled to start at 5:30 p.m., the company’s boss, Satay Nadella, will take the opening speech only half an hour later. If you can’t keep up or you don’t enjoy the video, we will continuously add the main news to the article.

20:20 The end!

The opening keynote time is up. The Build itself will last two more days, and during them we will also show you other news that Microsoft did not talk about during the first lecture. So you can read the newly published article about what awaits us in the next Windows 11 update.

20:15 Microsoft is green

The company powers its giant data centers from renewable sources and wants to be fully carbon neutral by 2030. By 2050, they will also pay off all the environmental debt from the past.

20:10 The most powerful hardware for AI

After a half-hour demo of creating AI applications, something exciting again. Microsoft is the first to deploy the most powerful computing accelerators Nvidia H100 in data centers. Tens of thousands of these cards that will be used for training and running artificial intelligences.

19:40 Copilox X

Thomas Dohmke, head of GitHub, talks about Copilot X, which will help programmers with all phases of software development. It’s not completely new, we’ve known from her since March, so run to Kuba’s article. Incidentally, GitHub is the first Microsoft product to implement Copilot. Dohmke demonstrated in practice how Copilot X modified and fixed his Python code and then also ran tests.

19:35 Create applications…

… and some users are happy after***

19:30 AI must not be misused for disinformation

Microsoft will strive to ensure that computer-generated text, images, or videos are not misused to spread misinformation or other objectionable content. The company will therefore insert watermarks into the image identifying the work of AI. At the same time, it wants to help with the detection of other generated content. We will know the details later.

19:25 AI will take the job of Mark Prchal

Scott used the aforementioned six connected AIs to transcribe the podcast into text, make a short annotation, find out the biographies of the people appearing, generate a themed image for it, and then automatically send the result as a LinkedIn post. This is what it looked like. He also provided the procedure and codes on GitHub.

19:20 Microsoft is open to all AI

Scott’s long monologue reminded us that Build is really a conference primarily for developers. He discussed in detail the creation of copilots. The most interesting part was the fact that Microsoft wants to support all possible neural networks in the cloud and tools, not just those from OpenAI. It doesn’t even have to run in the cloud, but locally on the PC. And they can be “easily” connected so that the output from one AI is the input to another. Scott himself chained together six different environments like this while processing a podcast recording with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

19:00 Plugins the key to smarter AI

Current language models are still quite stupid and limited because the datasets they were trained on did not cover all areas of human activity. Microsoft and OpenAI therefore want to encourage the creation of plugins that add new capabilities to AI.

18:55 Tik-tok like Intel

Brockman mentioned that the development of new language models will proceed similarly to how Intel processors used to be born – the tick-tock model. One generation will bring groundbreaking news, the other smaller changes, but above all optimization so that AI can run faster and cheaper. At the same time, GPT-4 is the tick and GPT-5 will probably be the flow. So we probably can’t expect groundbreaking news. But maybe something like GPT-4.5 will arrive in the meantime.

18:50 Brand new GPT-4 foundation

Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, mentioned that when developing GPT-4, they had to completely redo the infrastructure and optimize a lot of details. Indeed, the capabilities of the new generation of AI have increased more than the available performance.

18:47 Anyone can create a Copilot

Microsoft already has about ten different copilots. Kevin Scott suggests that additional co-pilots will be able to be created by the community. But we don’t know the details.

18:45 Big crazy love

The reason why AI is already running so well today is said to be the fact that two jewels have come together. According to Scott, it is the best cloud (Azure) and the best language model (GPT). Microsoft has invested over 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, so it really trusts its technologies.

18:42 Another attack by AI

After Nadella comes Kevin Scott, AI technology chief. The topic will obviously not change.

18:40 Microsoft Fabric

Fabric is a new analytical tool that literally cuts through all corporate data services such as Power BI, Data Factory or Synapse. Even in Fabric, artificial intelligence will help, because it collects so much information that it is beyond human power to take it all.

18:35 Bing Chat and Copilot will also learn plugins

The same plugins that will work in ChatGPT will also work in AI from Microsoft and vice versa. By partnering with OpenAI, Microsoft will use the same foundation for creating extensions, so developers don’t have to prepare plugins for x different AIs.

18:30 ChatGPT makes friends with Bing

Support for add-ons is gradually making its way to ChatGPT that will expand its capabilities beyond what it learned on datasets from the year-and-a-half-old site. One add-on is Bing, which makes ChatGPT tunnel to fresh web information.

18:25 Direct control of the system

Copilot in Windows will not only help with searching and typing, but will also be able to control certain parts of the system. It turns on the timer, switches the theme, etc. It also understands the context of some running applications.

18:20 Windows Copilot

So in the end, AI will not really penetrate until Windows 12, but already in Eleven. Windows Copilot, an AI assistant that will always be at hand, will head into the system.

18:15 Something is always happening

Thanks to AI, Microsoft introduces something new every week. And today he wants to reveal over 50 of them. He will focus on five in more detail.

18:10 Nadella on stage!

Here it comes. Nadella came and enthusiastically talks about how happy he is that after three years Build could be held again in a physical conference, not just digitally. And he really started the current revolution. He compares ChatGPT to the huge change previously brought by the first iPhone, the World Wide Web or the Xerox Alto computer.

18:00 Microsoft is taking its time

The opening statement is still being postponed. But we already know that the head of the company, Nadella, will actually speak at the beginning, along with Yusuf Mehdi, the company’s vice president, who oversees software, hardware and services. He has been heard a lot about Bing lately.

17:55 It will actually be about AI

In the conversation before the keynote, it was said that artificial intelligence will be the main topic. And that anyone who plays the drinking game and takes a shot every time the AI ​​chimes in is going to have a very challenging evening.

17:40 Will it come to Windows 12?

Our last Live Podcast was also about the future of Windows. We speculated about the upcoming Windows 12 and what Microsoft could give in the Eleventh.