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Generative AI unsurprisingly dominated the discussions at Microsoft Inspire conference this week. The conference comes in the middle of a year that started with the company investing billions in OpenAI and then following with a series of releases, most notably Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot in Microsoft Viva.
As chairman and CEO Satya Nadella put it during his keynote, “We are in the midst of a massive platform shift ….”
But change comes at a cost. And in the case of Copilot, a literal cost. Namely, $30 per user per month.
Copilot embeds a ChatGPT-driven conversational AI into the applications in Microsoft 365. The $30 comes on top of whatever the business is paying for its Microsoft 365 licenses.
Microsoft justifies the price by noting the wide variety of work tasks Copilot can assist with as compared with commercially available generative AI apps.
The Copilot pricing wasn't the only noteworthy announcement made at the conference. In a separate development, Meta and Microsoft announced support for Meta's Llama 2 (LLMs) on Azure and Windows.
Meta's Llama is the social media giant's entry into the large language model race. The original Llama release was only available by request as Meta feared potential misuse by the general public.
With the new partnership, developers and organizations can use Llama 2 to build generative AI-powered tools and experiences attuned to their own parameters. Microsoft will be Meta’s preferred partner for the release of Llama 2. The result is Azure customers can deploy 7B-parameter, 13B-parameter and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models easily and safely on Azure. Llama 2 can also be run locally on Windows.
Microsoft also confirmed Copilot in Viva will be included in the Viva suite at no additional cost when its preview is released later this year as well as launched Bing Chat Enterprise in preview this week, once again at no additional cost to customers using Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium.
EU Probe Against Microsoft Poised to Move Forward
Ignite took place against the backdrop of news out of the EU saying it would investigate Microsoft's practice of bundling Teams into Office.
The announcement, first reported by the Financial Times, came as no surprise. The probe cited a complaint lodged by Slack in July 2020 as part of the reasoning behind the probe, in which the then independent firm called the practice anti-competitive and illegal.
A report from the Reuters news agency earlier in July described ongoing discussions between Microsoft and the EU. While the former made some concessions separating Teams and Office in certain conditions, sources close to the issue stated the concessions didn’t go far enough.
The Financial Times corroborated the ongoing talks between the two, but stated that at this point, it is very unlikely Microsoft will avoid the investigation.
Microsoft won’t be alone coming under EU scrutiny. Apple, Google and Meta are all facing commission investigations for alleged anti-competitive practices as the EU has started to get tough on US tech companies operating in Europe.
The determination of the EU was once again in the spotlight this week after Fiona Scott Morton, a Yale University professor and big tech expert, had to stand down as economic advisor to EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager because of objections by some member states to the appointment of an American to such a key role in Europe.
Morton had been recently appointed by the EU chief Ursula von der Leyen because of her experience in the US Department of Justice's antitrust division in 2011 and 2012. Margrethe Vestager, in a statement issued about Fiona Scott Morton’s decision July 19 said: "I also wish her all the best for the future, and that she will continue to use her extraordinary skill set and expertise to push for strong competition enforcement and regulation on both sides of the Atlantic."
The letter underlines the EU’s current frame of mind in respect of Big Tech. While Microsoft is the most recent company to run into trouble, it is unlikely to be the last.
Is Apple Secretly Building 'Apple GPT'?
Elsewhere this week, Bloomberg News reported that Apple is currently working on a generative AI offering to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.
According to the article, the company is building its own framework to create large language models (LLMs) and is testing a chatbot built on the 'Ajax' framework nicknamed 'Apple GPT,' according to "people familiar with the effort."
While Apple has not confirmed the news, the markets responded with a 2.3% rise in Apple stock during the week, reaching a record high.
Apple has avoided making public statements about generative AI to date, making it the only big vendor that hasn’t laid out its plans in the field.
It has, however, introduced AI into some of its products including its recently announced VR headset, Vision Pro.
Wipro Launches ai360 Ecosystem
Also this week, Wipro announced the launch of Wipro ai360, which the company describes as an ecosystem built around its "decade-long" investments and research into artificial intelligence.
According to a statement from the company, the goal is to bring AI into every internal tool and platform as well as into the products it offers clients. To underline this commitment, it also announced a $1 billion investment into AI development over the next three years.
The investment will focus not only on AI itself, but the technologies that feed into it, notably big data and analytics. The company also stated it was developing a new research platform, but didn’t offer further details. Part of the investment will also be used to train Wipro's 250,000 employees on AI.
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The new Wipro ai360 will pull together 30,000 experts in the field of data analytics and AI from four existing business areas, notably cloud and partnerships, data, analytics and AI design, and consulting and cybersecurity. Wipro’s innovation hub, Lab45, will be a core part of the ecosystem, focused on providing training and talent as well as research into how to ensure AI adoption. It also plans to accelerate investment in what it describes as cutting-edge start-ups.
Wipro isn't the only company focused on coupling AI development with training. Competitor Tata Consultancy Services has also announced plans to train 25,000 engineers for Azure Open AI certification. It also plans on launching its new Generative AI Enterprise Adoption offering on Microsoft Cloud.
Qualtrics Launches XM/os2
AI investment is in the air. Experience management company Qualtrics also announced a $500 million, four-year investment in AI this week. The funding announcement arrived in the bigger announcement of the launch of the newest generation of its platform, XM/os2.
The updated platform uses AI to deliver personalized content and automate next steps based on a massive data set of the 3.5 billion conversations and interactions the company collects in a year. XM/os2 includes new features for both customer facing teams as well as HR leaders. The new AI-driven capabilities for managers include:
- Qualtrics XM for People Teams: Keeps employee well-being at the center, the new feature analyzes structured and unstructured data from surveys, internal message boards and public job site reviews to build a picture of employee sentiment and work habits for managers, as well as suggesting potential remediation where needed.
- Qualtrics Manager Assist: Currently available in private beta, the new personalized AI coach analyzes survey results, open text comments and sentiment to suggest areas for improvement.
- The new features also includes one aimed at reducing attrition. In this case, it uses predictive AI to flag employees at risk of leaving as well as identifying reasons behind the attrition so managers and HR leaders can step in.
FedML Raises $11.5M in Seed Funding
Finally this week, FedML announced a seed funding round aimed at expanding and developing its MLOps platform. According to a statement from the company, the platform trains and develops generative AI and LLMs using proprietary data.
The company aims to reduce the prohibitive expense involved in training LLMs on company, or industry specific data. Cloud infrastructure and engineering costs drive up the expense of creating such custom models.
FedML aims to cut costs through use of distributed machine learning at the edge. Three specific solutions work together to reach this goal:
- The MLOps platform that simplifies the training and the training and monitoring of generative models.
- A distributed and federated training/serving library for models in distributed settings.
- A GPU cloud — GPU (graphics processing unit) is built for general-purpose scientific and engineering computing — to reduce training and serving costs.
FedML recently introduced FedLLM, a customized training model for building domain-specific large language models on proprietary data.
FedML was founded in 2022. The $11.5 million seed round includes $4.3 million in a first tranche previously disclosed in March, plus $7.2 million in a second tranche that closed earlier this month.