Bing Chat becomes Microsoft Copilot and gains its independence

A veritable whirlwind of news related to artificial intelligence is Microsoft’s program for its annual Ignite conference. We sort through the hundreds of improvements and new functions announced.

Microsoft pulled out all the stops during the Ignite conference, which amplifies the “all AI” strategy initiated by the publisher at the start of the year with the integration of a chatbot in Bing. And to all lord all honor, the company has decided to rename Bing Chat which becomes Microsoft Copilot! Internet users will be able to access it from Bing, but also via this new address from December 1st.

Read AI is not enough for Bing to eat away at Google’s market share

Companies, which are Microsoft’s first commercial target in this whole story, will be able to create their own “copilots” thanks to a new tool, Copilot Studio. The latter ingests the data provided by the company, combines it with its conversational capabilities and pre-integrated connectors (SAP, Workday and ServiceNow are partners). It is nothing more and nothing less than designing a specialized bot for internal or external use.

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This massive infusion of AI also concerns data centers and Azure infrastructures. Microsoft pulled out all the stops by unveiling new in-house chips: Azure Maia (AI acceleration for training and inferences) and Azure Cobalt based on Arm to optimize performance and energy efficiency. These are Microsoft’s first chips for its cloud infrastructure.

Developers are not forgotten with Azure AI Studio, a platform for designing, testing and deploying AI apps (creation and training of your own co-pilots). Turbo versions of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 will be supported, in a preview version at the end of the month.

Read ChatGPT: 100 million users, a boost for GPT-4 and a bot store

There will be many other Microsoft announcements aimed at general public users, but for that we will have to wait until the end of the first keynotes!