Tag: Recent News

How Azure is powering the future of AI

AI is helping organizations solve some of today’s toughest challenges, and businesses are seeking a partner to streamline adoption and rapidly apply intelligence across workloads to improve operations and drive efficiencies.

Since 2016, Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, serving as the foundation of our vision to democratize AI as a platform. Through our initial investment and collaboration, Microsoft and OpenAI pushed the frontier of cloud supercomputing technology, announcing our first top-5 supercomputer in 2020 and subsequently constructing multiple AI supercomputing systems at massive scale. OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its breakthrough models, which are now deployed in Azure to power category-defining AI products like GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT. Today, this Azure infrastructure optimized for large language model training is available via Azure AI supercomputing capabilities in the cloud, This resource provides the combination of GPUs, networking hardware and virtualization software required to deliver the compute needed to power the next wave of AI innovation. Teams across Microsoft and Azure customers around the world are also using this global infrastructure to fine-tune the large AI models for specific use cases from more helpful chatbots to more accurate auto-generating captions. The unique ability of Azure’s AI optimized infrastructure to scale up and scale out makes it ideal for many of today’s AI workloads from AI model training to inference.

Microsoft’s AI platform, Azure AI, has a unique position with best-in-class, enterprise-scale, trusted solutions. Azure AI is the most comprehensive, open and trusted AI platform for the enterprise. Our approach to AI is built on a strong foundation of deep research and we offer customers the same proven Azure AI capabilities that power Xbox, HoloLens, Bing, Teams, and Microsoft 365 to developers and customers, empowering them to achieve more. It’s why Azure AI is used by over 85% of Fortune 100 companies today. Organizations large and small are deploying Azure AI solutions because they can achieve more at scale more easily, with the proper enterprise-level and responsible AI protections from Azure. We’ve designed Azure AI to enable developers, data scientists of all skill levels and even business users to quickly build, deploy and manage intelligent cloud-native apps so the power of AI can be utilized across an organization.

Azure AI helps empower every person in any organization to achieve more with productive, enterprise-scale, secure solutions:

• Azure Applied AI Services offers specialized AI services to help customers use AI services more easily for time-consuming tasks, including document processing, metric monitoring, enterprise search, video analysis, chat bots and more.
• Azure Cognitive Services is a comprehensive family of customizable cognitive APIs for vision, speech, language, and decision making.
• Azure Machine Learning is an end-to-end platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models at scale, while helping organizations understand, protect, and control data, models and processes.

In Azure, we offer the best tools across the machine learning lifecycle from data preparation to model management. Data scientists and machine learning engineers can use Azure Machine Learning to build, train, deploy and operate large-scale AI models at scale. We’re also scaling AI innovation through Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cognitive Service for Language and Azure Cognitive Service for Speech — to help developers accelerate time-to-value using pre-built models as well as with customizable models to design AI applications specific to their organizations. With Azure OpenAI Service our goal is to blend the power of OpenAI’s models with the promise of enterprise-grade security, compliance, responsible AI and global availability across regions that developers expect from Microsoft Azure.

Industry partners including Meta, AMD, Hugging Face and OpenAI are choosing Azure to enable AI innovation, while customers including H&R Block, CarMax, Beiersdorf, PwC and Progressive Insurance are using Azure AI to reimagine customer experiences, remove friction in business-critical processes to help end-users and employees focus their time and energy on valuable work.

How Microsoft Research is advancing the state of the art in AI

For 30 years, Microsoft Research (MSR) has been at the forefront of advancing the foundations of computing and translating new scientific understanding into innovative technologies to create value for Microsoft customers and broad benefit to society. MSR has been a pioneer, delivering cutting-edge AI breakthroughs in vision, speech, language, decision making and machine learning, including conversational speech recognition, machine translation, image captioning, and common-sense question answering, and we translate these breakthroughs into products to help Microsoft customers. We’re not inventing for the sake of inventing, we are focused on how the AI systems of today can help people solve real-world challenges.

More recent efforts have focused on developing large-scale models that can process information in increasingly sophisticated ways while also becoming more natural and intuitive to use. Advances in deep learning, coupled with internet-scale datasets and Microsoft Azure’s increasingly powerful AI supercomputing resources, have made it possible to create AI models that perform a broad range of tasks across many different applications.

Microsoft researchers have been working on these problems for years, developing expertise in areas like parallel computation that allows people to more quickly train machine learning models at unprecedented scale. That’s led to innovations like DeepSpeed, an open-source, deep learning optimization library for distributed training that was developed by Microsoft Research and now is used by the broader computing community and ONNX Runtime, which gives high-performance inference support for large Transformer-based models, helping to optimize cost and latency.

We also know we can’t do this work alone, which is why we work across disciplines and geographies; innovate with universities, institutions and companies like OpenAI, Meta, AMD and Hugging Face, an AI community; and contribute to the open-source community to push the industry forward.

Our world-class research community, combined with advancements in deep learning, massive training data, powerful Azure computing infrastructure, dedication to responsibility and partnerships with industry leaders drive our AI evolution.

Research to product

• Microsoft researchers in 2018 were the first to reach a significant milestone in translation, translating news articles from Chinese to English on a commonly used test set. As soon as the team achieved that historic research milestone, they began adapting the model to work in Microsoft Translator, an Azure Cognitive Service that translates a wide variety of texts ranging from historical research documents to travel websites and production manuals.
• In June 2019, Microsoft researchers were the first to develop a machine learning model that surpassed previous benchmarks on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, which measures mastery of nine different language understanding tasks ranging from sentiment analysis to text similarity and question answering. Bing’s experts incorporated core principles from that research into their own machine learning model, which helped to improve answers and caption generation.
• In 2020, Microsoft researchers built an AI system that can generate accurate image captions. The new model was made available to customers via the Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision offering, part of Azure AI, enabling developers to use this capability to improve accessibility in their own services. It was also incorporated into Seeing AI and rolled out to Microsoft Word and Outlook for Windows and Mac, and PowerPoint for Windows, Mac and web.
• In 2022, Microsoft researchers developed a new class of AI models called Z-code, boosting even more accuracy in Translator, an Azure Cognitive Service. Microsoft’s Z-code models consistently improved translation quality over current production models, according to common industry metrics.

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In recent months, the rise of generative AI models has triggered widespread recognition that the age of AI has begun. But until now, generative AI has largely benefited the individual. That’s changing today, as we widely release GitHub Copilot for Business to every team, organization and enterprise. 🤖 Already, Copilot is helping developers write code 55% faster, with developers reporting feeling 75% more fulfilled (aka happier!). Imagine the benefits of putting GitHub Copilot in the hands of 100-, 1,000-, or even 10,000-person development teams. For an organization, developers fixing bugs faster means your product and supply chain is more secure. Developers manually writing less boilerplate over and over again means your teams are more productive and focused. Developers being able to learn and onboard new technologies means they can deliver better solutions for your customers. Ultimately, Copilot for Business gives developers the ability to build for tomorrow instead of spending all their time bogged down with the problems of today. Empowering developers with the power of AI is how every organization can win the future. There is so much more to come from us on this front soon. 🚀 Read more in the official blog below. https://lnkd.in/eyKwKJkh

In recent months, the rise of generative AI models has triggered widespread recognition that the age of AI has begun. But until now, generative AI has largely benefited the individual. That’s changing today, as we widely release GitHub Copilot for Business to every team, organization and enterprise. 🤖 Already, Copilot is helping developers write code 55% faster, with developers reporting feeling 75% more fulfilled (aka happier!). Imagine the benefits of putting GitHub Copilot in the hands of 100-, 1,000-, or even 10,000-person development teams. For an organization, developers fixing bugs faster means your product and supply chain is more secure. Developers manually writing less boilerplate over and over again means your teams are more productive and focused. Developers being able to learn and onboard new technologies means they can deliver better solutions for your customers. Ultimately, Copilot for Business gives developers the ability to build for tomorrow instead of spending all their time bogged down with the problems of today. Empowering developers with the power of AI is how every organization can win the future. There is so much more to come from us on this front soon. 🚀 Read more in the official blog below. https://lnkd.in/eyKwKJkh

Through a new 10-year agreement to support Boosteroid’s leading Ukrainian software development team, Microsoft will bring Xbox PC games, as well as Activision Blizzard titles including “Call of Duty,” to the largest independent cloud gaming provider in the world

KYIV, Ukraine, and REDMOND, Wash. — March 14, 2023 — Microsoft Corp. and Boosteroid on Tuesday announced a 10-year agreement to bring Xbox PC games to Boosteroid’s cloud gaming platform. Boosteroid, which has its software development team in Ukraine, recently surpassed 4 million users globally and has become the largest independent cloud gaming provider in the world. The agreement will also enable Activision Blizzard PC titles to be streamed by Boosteroid customers after Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard closes.

When combined with other partnerships recently announced by Microsoft, this means popular franchises such as “Call of Duty” will surpass more than 150 million additional players, and make games built by Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard playable on multiple cloud gaming services and subscriptions.

“We believe in the power of games to bring people together. That’s why Xbox is committed to give everyone more ways to play their favorite games, across devices,” said Phil Spencer, CEO of Gaming, Microsoft. “Bringing Xbox PC games to Boosteroid members, including Activision Blizzard titles such as ‘Call of Duty’ once the deal closes, is yet another step in realizing that vision.”

“Boosteroid shares Microsoft’s vision of bringing games to as many people, places and platforms as possible. It has long been our goal to provide gamers with an opportunity to enjoy their favorite titles on any device close at hand,” said Ivan Shvaichenko, Boosteroid CEO. “Today’s announcement is yet another step in this direction. Also, with our development team based in Ukraine, we appreciate Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to Ukraine, and we will be working together on an initiative supporting our local game development community to invest further in the economic recovery of the country.”

Boosteroid has operated since 2017 and has its research and development operations in Ukraine, based mostly in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Despite having two offices in Kharkiv damaged by Russian missile attacks, the company has continued to innovate and grow during the past 13 months of war. Since the beginning of 2023 alone, it has announced new steps to bring added cloud-based gaming services to the Mac, Chromebooks, Android set-top boxes and LG TVs. It offers cloud game streaming through both browser-based and dedicated applications, including for Windows, Linux, Android, Android TV and the macOS.

“Microsoft partnering with Boosteroid is welcome news and further evidence of the company’s ongoing support for Ukraine,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation. “Boosteroid’s Ukrainian dev team has built a world-class streaming platform under the most challenging circumstances and demonstrates the ingenuity and creativity of our citizens and local game developers.”

In addition to Ukraine itself, Boosteroid now serves gamers in the United States, United Kingdom and countries across the European Union. It operates through data center operations located in six U.S. states, including Microsoft’s home state of Washington, as well as in the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine and Serbia.

The gaming community is a vibrant part of Ukraine’s software ecosystem. Microsoft recently added support for the Ukrainian language for the Xbox console dashboard, PC and mobile apps. In spring 2023, Microsoft will launch PC Game Pass in Ukraine.

“This partnership builds on the $430 million in technology and financial assistance we have provided Ukraine since Russia’s unlawful invasion, and it exemplifies the steps we will continue to take to support Ukraine’s 160,000 software developers,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft Vice Chair and President. “It also adds to our recent agreements with Nintendo and NVIDIA, making even more clear to regulators that our acquisition of Activision Blizzard will make ‘Call of Duty’ available on far more devices than before.”

About Boosteroid

Boosteroid is the largest global independent cloud gaming provider which enables one-click access to PC video games across devices and platforms. With Boosteroid users run games they own on almost any PC, laptop, smartphone or smart TV. Boosteroid provides a high-end remote gaming desktop where games are actually rendered and then streamed back to the user device over the Internet. For this, Boosteroid utilises custom hardware designed together with leading technology companies like ASUS and Intel. The GPU-infrastructure that Boosteroid owns is located across Europe in 12 data centers of the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Slovakia and Ukraine; and across the USA in 6 data centers of different states. Such a wide servers’ net allows Boosteroid to deliver low-latency cloud gaming to millions of users globally.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

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Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, +1 (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

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In recent months, the rise of generative AI models has triggered widespread recognition that the age of AI has begun. But until now, generative AI has largely benefited the individual. That’s changing today, as we widely release GitHub Copilot for Business to every team, organization and enterprise. 🤖 Already, Copilot is helping developers write code 55% faster, with developers reporting feeling 75% more fulfilled (aka happier!). Imagine the benefits of putting GitHub Copilot in the hands of 100-, 1,000-, or even 10,000-person development teams. For an organization, developers fixing bugs faster means your product and supply chain is more secure. Developers manually writing less boilerplate over and over again means your teams are more productive and focused. Developers being able to learn and onboard new technologies means they can deliver better solutions for your customers. Ultimately, Copilot for Business gives developers the ability to build for tomorrow instead of spending all their time bogged down with the problems of today. Empowering developers with the power of AI is how every organization can win the future. There is so much more to come from us on this front soon. 🚀 Read more in the official blog below. https://lnkd.in/eyKwKJkh

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