Microsoft's Journey to AI Leadership (pt. 2)
Exploring Microsoft's major AI breakthroughs, updates, and research.
Hello Engineering Leaders and AI Enthusiasts!
Welcome to the 147th edition of The AI Edge newsletter. In this edition, we will catch up on Microsoft’s AI advancements as it surges to the top in the AI world.
Here’s a quick rundown of Microsoft’s latest AI announcements (oldest to latest).
🤝 Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic Unite for Safe AI Progress
💰 Microsoft’s many AI monetization plans 💾 Microsoft launches private ChatGPT
😟 Microsoft-DataBricks collab may hurt OpenAI
🚀 Microsoft and Paige to build the largest image-based AI model to fight cancer
📚 Microsoft, MIT, & Google transformed entire Project Gutenberg into audiobooks
🆕 Microsoft Research’s new language model trains AI cheaper and faster
💪 Microsoft Research's self-aligning LLMs
🤖 Microsoft’s Copilot puts AI into everything
🌟 Microsoft to debut AI chip and cut Nvidia GPU costs
🤑 Microsoft’s new AI program offering rewards upto $15k🔝 Microsoft is outdoing its biggest rival, Google, in AI
🎥 Microsoft’s New AI Advances Video Understanding with GPT-4V
Let’s go!
Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic Unite for Safe AI Progress
Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have jointly announced the establishment of the Frontier Model Forum, a new industry body to ensure the safe and responsible development of frontier AI systems.
The Forum aims to identify best practices for development and deployment, collaborate with various stakeholders, and support the development of applications that address societal challenges. It will leverage the expertise of its member companies to benefit the entire AI ecosystem by advancing technical evaluations, developing benchmarks, and creating a public library of solutions.
Why does this matter?
This joint announcement reflects the commitment of these tech giants to promote responsible AI development, benefiting the entire AI ecosystem through technical evaluations, industry standards, and shared knowledge.
Microsoft’s many AI monetization plans
Microsoft has announced new Azure AI infrastructure advancements and availability to bring its customers closer to the transformative power of generative AI.
Azure OpenAI Service goes global: OpenAI’s most advanced models, including GPT-4 and GPT-35-Turbo, will now be available in multiple new regions and locations.
General availability of ND H100 v5 VMs for unprecedented AI processing and scale: -It also announced general availability of the ND H100 v5 Virtual Machine series, featuring the latest NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and low-latency networking, propelling businesses into a new era of AI applications.
Why does it matter?
These enhancements will allow more customers to leverage the capabilities of generative AI, driving innovation and transformation across various industries. It will also empower their businesses with greater computational power with significantly faster AI model performance.
Microsoft launches private ChatGPT
Microsoft now offers OpenAI's ChatGPT model in its Azure OpenAI service, allowing developers and businesses to integrate conversational AI into their applications. ChatGPT can be used to power custom chatbots, automate emails, and provide summaries of conversations.
Azure OpenAI users can access a preview of ChatGPT starting today, with pricing set at $0.002 for 1,000 tokens. ChatGPT on Azure solution accelerator is an enterprise option. This solution provides a similar user experience to ChatGPT but is offered as your private ChatGPT.
Microsoft Azure ChatGPT offers several benefits to organizations:
Ensures data privacy with built-in guarantees and isolation from OpenAI-operated systems.
Allows full network isolation and offers enterprise-grade security controls.
Enhances business value by integrating internal data sources and services like ServiceNow.
Why does this matter?
Amid the excitement around ChatGPT, Microsoft has cleverly introduced an enterprise version to meet strong market demand. By prioritizing security, Azure simplifies and enhances companies' access to AI advantages. Also, Microsoft’s move aims to boost productivity through code editing, task automation, and more and offers enterprises a more secure way to share their data with AI.
Microsoft-DataBricks collab may hurt OpenAI
Microsoft is reportedly planning to sell a new version of Databricks software, It helps customers create AI applications for their businesses. This move could potentially harm OpenAI, as Databricks allows companies to develop AI models from scratch or repurpose open-source models instead of licensing OpenAI's proprietary ones.
Microsoft has been aggressively investing in AI services and integrating AI functionality across its products. Neither Microsoft nor Databricks have commented on the report.
Why does this matter?
Microsoft's reported intention to introduce an AI-focused Databricks software version carries implications for OpenAI. This software empowers businesses to craft AI solutions without relying on OpenAI's proprietary models, potentially impacting OpenAI's market.
Microsoft and Paige to build the largest image-based AI model to fight cancer
Paige, a technology disruptor in healthcare, has joined forces with Microsoft to build the world’s largest image-based AI models for digital pathology and oncology.
Paige developed the first Large Foundation Model using over one billion images from half a million pathology slides across multiple cancer types. Now, it is developing a new AI model with Microsoft that is orders of magnitude larger than any other image-based AI model existing today, configured with billions of parameters.
Paige will utilize Microsoft’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure to train the technology at scale and ultimately deploy it to hospitals and laboratories across the globe using Azure.
Why does this matter?
This will help realize the potential of generative AI at an unprecedented scale, introduce completely novel capabilities of AI, and serve as the cornerstone for the next generation of clinical/healthcare applications built with AI.
Microsoft, MIT, and Google transformed entire Project Gutenberg Collection into audiobooks
In a new research called Large-Scale Automatic Audiobook Creation, Microsoft, MIT, and Google collaborated to transform the entire Project Gutenberg Collection into audiobooks. The library now boasts thousands of free and open audiobooks powered by AI.
Utilizing recent advances in neural text-to-speech, the team achieved exceptional quality of voice acting. The system also allows users to customize an audiobook's speaking speed and style, emotional intonation, and can even match a desired voice using a small amount of sample audio.
Why does it matter?
This presents an exceptional use case for text-to-speech AI. Moreover, it introduces a scalable system capable of converting thousands of HTML-based e-books to high-quality audiobooks. This signifies a remarkable leap in AI's ability to solve real-world problems with tangible impact.
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Microsoft Research’s new language model trains AI cheaper and faster
Microsoft Research has developed a new language model called phi-1.5 that could make training AI models cheaper and faster. The model uses curated synthetic data from existing large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Despite having only 1 billion parameters compared to models with over 100 billion inputs, phi-1.5 has shown promising abilities with eliminating the need for web scraping or relying on data sources with copyright issues.
The model can reason and solve complex problems such as grade-school mathematics and basic coding. It exhibits traits of larger language models, both positive and negative, including the ability to think step by step and the potential for biased and toxic generations.
Why does this matter?
Despite having only 1 billion parameters compared to models with over 100B inputs, phi-1.5 has shown promising abilities and performs well on natural language tasks.
It eliminates the need for web scraping or relying on data sources with copyright issues. This research could democratize AI training by making it accessible to smaller organizations and reducing the reliance on specialized computing power.
Microsoft Research's self-aligning LLMs
The paper introduces a method called RAIN that allows language models to align themselves with human preferences without the need for finetuning or extra data. By integrating self-evaluation and rewind mechanisms, unaligned models can produce responses consistent with human preferences through self-boosting.
RAIN operates without training or parameter updates and uses a fixed-template prompt to guide the model's alignment with human preferences. Experimental results show that RAIN significantly improves the harmlessness rate of language models while maintaining their helpfulness. It also establishes a new defense baseline against adversarial attacks.
Why does this matter?
RAIN enhances user safety by allowing language models to align with human preferences, reducing harmful outputs, and ensuring more helpful responses in various applications, from customer support to content generation.
Source
Microsoft’s Copilot puts AI into everything
Microsoft has announced a new AI-powered feature, Microsoft Copilot. It’ll bring AI features into various Windows 11, Microsoft 365, Edge, and Bing. Our first impressions are that it’s Bing but for Windows. You can use Copilot to rearrange windows, generate text, open apps on the web, edit pictures, and more.
Copilot can be accessed via an app or with a simple right-click and will be rolled out across Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365 this fall, with the free Windows 11 update starting on September 26th.
Why does this matter?
While we don’t see any revolutionary use cases of Copilot as of now, it’s still a huge step towards democratizing AI. As more users get their hands on this AI copilot, we’ll know the true extent of its effectiveness. If all goes well, Microsoft will end up grabbing an even bigger share of the AI market as it will deliver AI natively to all Windows devices.
Microsoft to debut AI chip and cut Nvidia GPU costs
Microsoft plans to unveil its first chip designed for AI at its annual developers’ conference next month. Similar to Nvidia GPUs, the chip will be designed for data center servers that train and run LLMs, and is codenamed Athena.
Microsoft’s data center servers currently use Nvidia GPUs to power cutting-edge LLMs for cloud customers, including OpenAI and Intuit, as well as for AI features in Microsoft’s productivity apps.
Why does this matter?
The move will allow Microsoft to reduce its reliance on Nvidia-designed AI chips, which have been in short supply as demand for them has boomed.
Additionally, it could lead to a return on Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, which has reportedly raised concerns about expensive costs of hardware required to power its AI models and is, thus, also exploring making its own chips.
Microsoft’s new AI program offering rewards upto $15k
Microsoft has launched a new AI program called the Microsoft AI Bug Bounty Program, offering rewards of up to $15,000. The program focuses on the AI-powered Bing experience, with eligible products including Bing Chat, Bing Image Creator, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Start Application, and Skype Mobile Application.
The program is part of Microsoft's ongoing efforts to protect customers from security threats and reflects the company's investment in AI security research. Security researchers can submit their findings through the MSRC Researcher Portal & earn rewards, and Microsoft is excited to learn and improve its vulnerability management process for AI systems.
Why does this matter?
Microsoft’s encouragement to partner with security researchers shows the agenda to protect customers from security threats, This shows a huge contribution to improving the reliability of AI-powered services.
Microsoft is outdoing its biggest rival, Google, in AI
From the two tech giants’ September-quarter results, growth at Microsoft’s Azure cloud unit (and the company generally) accelerated in the quarter due to higher-than-expected consumption of AI-related services.
In the same quarter, growth at Google Cloud slowed by nearly 6 percentage points. The most likely conclusion is that Google Cloud isn’t yet benefiting much from the rollout of various AI-powered services.
Why does this matter?
Microsoft’s outperformance shouldn’t be a huge surprise, given its partnership with OpenAI, which has powered various Microsoft products, giving it an edge over Google.
But this is a problem for OpenAI too. Some customers are beginning to buy its software through Microsoft because they can bundle the purchase with other products. Microsoft keeps much of the OpenAI-related revenue it generates.
Microsoft’s New AI Advances Video Understanding with GPT-4V
A paper by Microsoft Azure AI introduces “MM-VID”, a system that combines GPT-4V with specialized tools in vision, audio, and speech to enhance video understanding. MM-VID addresses challenges in analyzing long-form videos and complex tasks like understanding storylines spanning multiple episodes.
Experimental results show MM-VID's effectiveness across different video genres and lengths. It uses GPT-4V to transcribe multimodal elements into a detailed textual script, enabling advanced capabilities like audio description and character identification.
Why does this matter?
Improved video understanding can make content more enjoyable for all viewers. Also, MM-VID's impact can be seen in inclusive media consumption, interactive gaming experiences, and user-friendly interfaces, making technology more accessible and useful in our daily lives.
That's all for now!
Stay tuned for more exciting developments from big enterprises!
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Thanks for reading, and see you tomorrow. 😊