Microsoft is Hell Bent on Bringing AI to Windows

The AI-as-a-copilot company, Microsoft, is moving beyond merely integrating generative AI on Azure and is planning to deploy it in Windows applications. This time, it is not just adding ChatGPT to everything, but much more. 

According to a recent report by Windows Central, the company is striving to integrate Windows 11 applications, including Photos, Snipping Tool, and Paint with generative AI capabilities. Undoubtedly, the image-generation capabilities would be powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E, the same technology that the company employs for Bing Image Generator.

Regarding the upgrade to the Camera and Photos app, there’s a possibility that Microsoft will incorporate optical character recognition (OCR) technology into both applications. This advancement has the potential to empower each app to recognise text, individuals, and objects within photos or screenshots, thereby significantly simplifying the process of copying and pasting information from these sources. 

Snipping Tool is also expected to get an OCR technology update. This strategic enhancement would enable Windows 11 to promptly recognise and replicate text from screenshots onto the clipboard, streamlining information utilisation. Sounds interesting, but all of this comes with a mild hit of security issues.

Another recent development by Microsoft, when it announced the integration of Python into Excel, has been met with some questions due to issues related to privacy and security. Developers have raised concerns as the program can not run locally but only on Azure Cloud. And the community is clearly not completely on board with this decision. 

Same can be expected from the Paint application. Running text-to-image models locally is a Herculean task and requires a lot of computation within a single device. On the other hand, Paint has always been a locally running software with minimal computation requirements. Being the ideal way to keep the load less on the device, Microsoft will link it to the cloud as well. 

Coupling this with OCR on Snipping Tool, Photos, and Camera, people are concerned about sharing all of this information with Microsoft through the cloud connection. Ideally, it would make sense for Microsoft to run towards building edge capable products before deploying these on the Windows ecosystem. 

The timeline for the rollout of these AI integrations remains ambiguous as Microsoft is meticulously fine-tuning these concepts. An imminent ‘special event’ scheduled for September 21, is anticipated to unveil new Surface hardware while shedding further light on Microsoft’s AI roadmap for Windows.

To Microsoft’s credit, the company has been in talks with Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, and NVIDIA for developing support for AI on the silicon level, allowing edge computing on Windows devices. When it comes to current LLMs, such as Llama 2, the computation requirements have gone down significantly, but not enough to make it available for everyone on their devices locally without occupying massive amounts of storage and RAM usage. Releasing Llama 2 with Meta on Microsoft cloud was possibly a hint towards optimising it in the future as well. 

Over the past year, the tech giant has consistently spotlighted AI functionalities across its product portfolio. Notably, the trend has transcended to its flagship operating system, Windows 11. Two prominent AI-driven features were announced at Microsoft Build 2023,  Windows Studio Effects and the eagerly anticipated Windows Copilot, have already been announced, with the latter set to debut this fall.

Arguably, the hype around products like ChatGPT has been on the decline. It may well be just a handful of people eagerly waiting for their Windows 11 computer to be able to generate ChatGPT-like text locally, though it would definitely prove to be very useful. 

Even if Microsoft ends up integrating all of these products on Windows 11 locally, the only question that remains is, will MineSweeper or Notepad get an AI upgrade as well? 

Funnily enough, this move might even mark the revival of the loved and hated Clippy assistant on Office products. This time, with the integration of generative AI, it might be even more helpful, or even more annoying. Well, the company has already announced plans to invest in it, so who knows?

Microsoft plans AI service with Databricks that could hurt OpenAI- The Information

A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France, January 25, 2023. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights

Aug 17 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O) is planning to start selling a new version of Databricks software that helps customers make AI apps for their businesses, The Information reported on Thursday, citing people with direct knowledge of the plan.

Databricks - a data analytics platform that uses artificial intelligence, which Microsoft would sell through its Azure cloud-server unit - helps companies make AI models from scratch or repurpose open-source models as an alternative to licensing OpenAI's proprietary ones, the report added.

Microsoft and Databricks did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

In July, Microsoft laid out an aggressive spending plan to meet demand for its AI services.

The company has started integrating AI functionality across its products such as Azure, Microsoft 365, GitHub and several developer tools.

Reporting by Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Microsoft 365 Copilot AI’s steep price is an ill omen for Windows users

If you thought that Microsoft wouldn’t capitalize on its AI opportunity for businesses, think again.

Microsoft will tell its corporate partners this week at Microsoft Inspire that it will charge a whopping $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-assisted features for its Microsoft 365 suite — double what it’s charging for Microsoft 365 by itself. Microsoft is also announcing a specialized version of Bing Chat for businesses, Bing Chat Enterprise, that will can be used to ask the AI questions about a company’s confidential information without it being leaked outside of corporate firewalls.

Microsoft is clearly betting that enterprises will value Microsoft 365 Copilot enough that they’ll want to pay for the additional features Copilot offers, which vary by Office application. In fact, Microsoft isn’t even saying when Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available this week at its Inspire conference — just preparing those customers (specifically Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers) that they’ll have to pay a ton for the additional AI services.

First announced in March, Microsoft 365 Copilot continues to apply intelligence to enterprise data, the portion of Microsoft’s customer base most likely to want to invest in smarter decisions. For years, these smarts were reserved for PowerBI, bringing in third-party sources of data to let users and Microsoft analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their businesses.

Now, AI will be everywhere. We identified Microsoft 365 Copilot as Microsoft’s killer app, not only because of its AI capabilities but because how Microsoft 365 Copilot can change your everyday work day: allowing you to actually skip meetings, zip through your email, and author documents and presentations.

Microsoft

Microsoft clearly believes that businesses will pay up. Microsoft actually charges businesses about what consumers end up paying for Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 Apps for Business is the most comparable plan, and Microsoft charges $8.25 per user per month for the desktop versions of the Office apps plus a terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage. Microsoft 365 Business Standard ($12.50/user/mo) and Business Premium ($22/user/mo) cost more for additional data controls. Put another way, Microsoft is charging more per user per month for AI — double, in some cases! — than Office itself.

“The comparatively high price point for Microsoft 365 Copilot will likely mean that most early adopting customers will focus on equipping employee roles that have high-value use cases for generative AI, such as marketing, sales and customer service, rather than just roll it out enterprise-wide to all Microsoft 365 users,” said Jason Wong, a vice president and analyst at Gartner, in an email. “With all the hype for generative AI, organizations expect equal value in return.”

What Microsoft hasn’t done, however, is disclose anything about what the company will charge everyday Windows users for adding AI to its consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Microsoft currently charges $69.99 per year for Microsoft 365 Personal ($6.99 per month), and $99.99 per year (or $9.99 per month) for a Microsoft 365 Family Plan for between two to six people. If Microsoft plans to charge an additional $30/user/mo for Microsoft 365 Copilot, will consumers end up footing a similar bill?

We don’t know. A company representative replied that Microsoft has “nothing more to share” about what, if anything, it will charge consumers for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft

We do know, of course, that Microsoft loves subscriptions. Just this week, Microsoft revamped its Games with Gold program (which gave you free Xbox games) to rename it as Game Pass Core, which allows you access to a small subset of games within of the main Game Pass Ultimate subscription. Windows is the “socket” for subscriptions, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has said. Meanwhile, more and more Windows apps quietly hide subscriptions, and that’s before you arrive at Microsoft 365’s overt monthly payment. Microsoft wants you paying for Office, and probably AI, like your water bill — grumble all you want, but just put it on autopay and budget it in.

To sweeten the deal, Microsoft is adding the Bing Chat Enterprise to the same Microsoft 365 business plans that are receiving paid access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, but at no additional cost. What Microsoft is doing, however, is making Bing Chat Enterprise available to those businesses who do not want to pay for Microsoft 365 for an optional $5 per user, per month.

“Just like Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is grounded in web data and provides complete, verifiable answers with citations, along with visual answers that include graphs, charts and images,” Microsoft said in a blog post. More importantly, the information a business customer enters is not sent into the Microsoft cloud, but remains protected.

On Windows, Windows Copilot is essentially a front door to Bing Chat on the Web, a somewhat unimpressive anticlimax to months of Microsoft hype. But it is free, at least for now, and Microsoft is adding a new feature: visual search. That’s a response to Google Bard, Google’s own AI engine, which added visual search last week.

In search, though, the race between Google and Microsoft is a tight one. Consumers will benefit as each company tries to entice you with free features. Google’s Workspace is fighting to increase its market share in the enterprise, but Microsoft clearly feels that Microsoft 365 has the upper hand — and will demand businesses pay for the additional AI capabilities. How the company eventually prices Microsoft 365 for consumers, though, will be a major tell in how it believes average users perceive Microsoft 365 versus Google Workspace. Right now, it looks like Microsoft expects you to open your wallet.