At the recent Build 2024 conference hosted by Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella commenced the keynote by recounting a compelling narrative about how technology had empowered an Indian farmer. This story marked the beginning of a series of exciting advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), including updates to Azure and Copilot, as well as groundbreaking innovations from collaborators like OpenAI.
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.”
During the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos in January, Nadella discussed the case of the Indian farmer with Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Nadella recounted how the farmer sought assistance with accessing a government program, stating, “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.”
Furthermore, Nadella revealed that the farmer initially hesitated to engage with the program and requested the bot to handle 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,” Nadella added.
The Build 2024 conference showcased two significant announcements from Microsoft in the realm of AI. Firstly, developers can now utilize OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-40, offering revolutionary AI capabilities. Secondly, Microsoft introduced Phi-3-Vision, a novel Small Language Model (SLM) capable of comprehending and analyzing images with exceptional proficiency.
These pioneering tools will be accessible through Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio, providing developers with a centralized platform to harness these advancements and explore the frontiers of AI.
Microsoft’s endeavors didn’t conclude there. They also unveiled robust new virtual machines tailored for efficiently managing AI workloads. Notably, they emerged as the inaugural cloud provider to integrate AMD’s state-of-the-art MI300X AI accelerator chip. This integration enhances the Azure ND MI300X v5 virtual machine series, positioning it as a formidable entity for executing intricate AI tasks.
