At Microsoft’s recent Build 2024 conference, CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the keynote with a captivating story about how technology empowered an Indian farmer. This anecdote served as a springboard for a series of exciting AI advancements, including updates to Azure and Copilot, along with groundbreaking innovations from Microsoft partners like OpenAI.
Mr Nadella shared, “In January 2023, I met a rural Indian farmer who used GPT-3.5, in his own voice, to understand government farm subsidies he’d heard about on television. It was a powerful moment for me. It illustrated the incredible impact of a cutting-edge model developed on the West Coast of the United States, now being used to directly improve the life of a rural farmer in India.”
In January, during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, Mr Nadella in conversation with Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), cited the example of the Indian farmer.
Mr Nadella shared that the farmer was trying to access some government programme. “He expressed a complex need in one of the local languages. This got translated and interpreted by a bot and a response came back saying go to a portal and here is how you will access the programme,” Mr Nadella revealed.
The Microsoft CEO further shared that the farmer was initially hesitant to use the programme and asked the bot to do it on his behalf. “And, it completed it and the reason why it was able to complete it was that the developer building it had taken GPT [General Purpose Technology] and trained it over all of the government of India documents and then scaffolded it with the speech recognition software,” Mr Nadella added.
At the Build 2024 conference, Microsoft made a splash in the AI world with two key announcements. First, developers can now access OpenAI’s most powerful model yet, GPT-40. This cutting-edge tool promises to revolutionize AI capabilities. Second, Microsoft introduced Phi-3-Vision, a new Small Language Model (SLM) with the remarkable ability to read and understand images.
These groundbreaking tools will be available on Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio, a one-stop shop for developers to leverage these advancements and push the boundaries of AI.
Microsoft didn’t stop there. They also unveiled powerful new virtual machines specifically designed for handling AI workloads with unmatched efficiency. Significantly, they became the first cloud provider to integrate AMD’s cutting-edge MI300X AI accelerator chip. This integration strengthens the Azure ND MI300X v5 virtual machine series, making it a powerhouse for running complex AI tasks.
