Microsoft has unveiled a new platform called Windows Agent Arena (WAA) to test AI assistants in realistic Windows environments. This was reported by Michael Nuñez on VentureBeat. WAA offers more than 150 different tasks in common Windows applications and allows for parallel evaluation in the Azure cloud. Microsoft also introduced a new AI agent called …
Microsoft’s head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, has caused an uproar with his statement that all content available online is “freeware”. This means that from his perspective anyone can copy this content and use it for their own creations, as long as the creators do not explicitly object. This statement is disputed by many experts, and …
Microsoft’s new “MInference” technology promises to significantly increase the processing speed of large language models by reducing the preprocessing time of long texts by up to 90%. An interactive demo on Hugging Face allows developers to test the technology and explore its capabilities.
Microsoft has unveiled Florence-2, a versatile AI model that can handle various image processing tasks with a single, unified approach. Available under an MIT license, the model appears to outperform larger specialized models in areas such as image annotation and object recognition, despite its compact size, and could help companies save on investments in separate …
Microsoft has scaled back its plans for a new Windows feature called Recall. Originally, Recall was supposed to be automatically activated and record user activity in the background to make it usable for AI applications. After heavy criticism from privacy advocates and security researchers, Recall is now optional. New security measures have also been introduced …
Microsoft is discontinuing GPT Builder for consumers just three months after its launch. The company does not believe it is economically viable to continue developing the service. Users have until July 14 to back up their data, after which all GPTs and associated information will be deleted.
With its new Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft wants to usher in an era in which generative AI is processed directly on the device rather than in the cloud. These PCs have special hardware (Neural Processing Units, NPUs) to run AI processes locally. The first Copilot+ laptops, developed in collaboration with companies such as AMD, Intel, Qualcomm …
Microsoft introduces Phi-3 Mini, its smallest AI model to date, which can compete with models such as GPT-3.5 despite its small size, making it ideal for companies with smaller data sets and limited budgets.
Microsoft’s VASA-1 can make human portraits sing and talk. It only needs a still image and an audio file with speech to generate moving lips, matching facial expressions and head movements. Microsoft emphasizes that this is a research demonstration only, with no plans to bring it to market.
Intel confirms that Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant will soon run locally on PCs powered by its chips. Intel’s Lunar Lake processors, due out at the end of the year, are expected to deliver three times the AI performance of current Meteor Lake chips, meeting the needs of the next generation of AI PCs.