Microsoft Unveils AI-Powered Innovations: GPT-5, Copilot+ PCs, Phi-3, and Devin Partnership

Microsoft unveils major AI innovations at Build 2023, including GPT-5, Copilot+ PCs with local AI acceleration, Phi-3 language model, and a partnership with Devin. The company is making AI a first-class citizen in Windows, enabling developers to build AI-powered applications and experiences.

February 24, 2025

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Discover the future of computing as Microsoft unveils its groundbreaking AI innovations, including the Windows Co-Pilot runtime, Co-Pilot+ PCs, and powerful new language models. Explore how these advancements will transform the way you interact with your devices and tackle complex tasks.

Accelerating Compute and the AI Revolution

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, highlighted the rapid acceleration of compute power that is driving the AI revolution. He noted that while Moore's Law was relatively stable, scaling at around 15-18 months, we now have technologies that are scaling every 6 months or doubling every 6 months.

This acceleration in compute power has enabled a new era of multimodal natural user interfaces that can process and generate text, speech, images, and video. It has also led to the development of memory systems that can retain important context and recall personal knowledge and data across applications and devices.

Furthermore, Nadella emphasized the new reasoning and planning capabilities that are emerging, which help us understand complex contexts and complete complex tasks while reducing cognitive load. He believes that this represents a fundamental shift in how we interact with computers, akin to the transition from the terminal to the graphical user interface.

To capitalize on these advancements, Microsoft is introducing the Windows Co-Pilot runtime, which aims to make Windows the best platform for building AI applications. This includes a collection of ready-to-use local APIs that enable the integration of AI capabilities into new experiences.

Nadella also highlighted the importance of Microsoft's strategic partnership with OpenAI, as well as their efforts to support open-source AI models and frameworks, such as the Hugging Face integration. The company is also expanding its own AI model offerings, including the introduction of the 53 Vision model and additional 53 family models.

Overall, Nadella's keynote emphasized Microsoft's all-in approach to AI, investing in hardware, software, and partnerships to accelerate the adoption and integration of AI across their platforms and products.

Microsoft Copilot: Your AI Companion

Microsoft is investing heavily in AI, making it a first-class citizen in Windows. The new Windows Copilot runtime aims to revolutionize how we interact with computers, much like the graphical user interface did for the terminal.

Copilot is Microsoft's everyday AI assistant, putting knowledge and expertise at your fingertips to help you act on it. The Copilot stack allows developers to build their own AI applications, solutions, and experiences.

Microsoft is also introducing a new category of "Copilot Plus PCs" - fully featured laptops and computers with specialized chips to accelerate local, large language models. This enables lightning-fast, on-device AI inference.

The Copilot library provides a collection of ready-to-use local APIs, allowing you to integrate a wide range of AI capabilities into your new experiences. This includes access to over 40 language models, including the new F-SiLiCA model designed for local inference on Copilot Plus PCs.

Copilot can also enable semantic search and recall, helping you remember and retrieve important context and information across your apps and devices. Microsoft is partnering with Nvidia to leverage their expertise in model training and optimization.

Overall, Microsoft is making a strong push to embed AI as a fundamental part of the Windows experience, empowering users and developers alike to leverage the power of this transformative technology.

The Windows Copilot Runtime and Local AI Models

Microsoft is introducing the Windows Copilot runtime, which aims to make Windows the best platform for building AI applications. Satya Nadella likens this to how Win32 was the graphical user interface standard, stating that the Windows Copilot runtime will do the same for AI.

The key points are:

  • The Windows Copilot Library provides a collection of ready-to-use local APIs to integrate AI capabilities into new experiences.
  • Microsoft is investing heavily in local, open-source AI models like the F-SiLU model, which is designed to run efficiently on the NPUs (Neural Processing Units) of Copilot Plus PCs.
  • The Copilot Library enables easy integration of vector search and semantic recall capabilities, allowing apps to leverage on-device data.
  • Microsoft is partnering with NVIDIA to leverage their expertise in model training and optimization, further enhancing the AI capabilities on Windows.
  • Microsoft is taking a balanced approach, supporting both closed-source models like OpenAI's as well as open-source alternatives like Meta's LLaMA, ensuring flexibility for developers.

Overall, Microsoft is positioning Windows as a first-class platform for AI development, providing a comprehensive set of tools and models to empower developers to build the next generation of AI-powered applications.

Nvidia Partnership and Open AI Integration

Microsoft is deepening its partnerships with key players in the AI ecosystem. Some key points:

  • Microsoft is partnering closely with Nvidia to leverage their hardware and software capabilities for training and fine-tuning AI models. Nvidia's CUDA platform is a critical component in this collaboration.

  • The partnership with OpenAI remains a strategic priority for Microsoft. Satya Nadella emphasized the importance of this relationship, though there are hints of potential tensions as Microsoft also invests in open-source alternatives like Meta's LLaMA.

  • Microsoft is integrating OpenAI's models, like GPT-4, deeply into its platforms and products. This includes bringing capabilities like natural language understanding, generation, and multimodal AI (text, images, etc.) into Windows, Microsoft 365, and developer tools.

  • The company is also expanding its own AI model offerings, with new versions of the Megatron-Turing NLG (MT-NLG) family, including a 7B parameter MT-NLG Small and a 14B parameter MT-NLG Medium model.

  • Microsoft is positioning these AI capabilities as a "first-class" part of the Windows platform, with new APIs and runtimes to enable developers to easily integrate advanced AI into their applications.

The overall theme is Microsoft's all-in approach to AI, leveraging partnerships, open-source, and its own internal developments to build a comprehensive AI platform across its products and services.

New 53 Model Additions and Enhanced Capabilities

Microsoft announced several new additions and enhancements to their 53 model family:

  • 53 Vision: A new 4.2 billion parameter multimodal model with language and vision capabilities. It can be used to reason over real-world images or generate insights and answer questions about images.
  • 53 Small: A new 7 billion parameter model, providing a smaller and more cost-effective option in the 53 model family.
  • 53 Medium: A new 14 billion parameter model, sitting between the 53 Small and the original 53 model in terms of size and quality.

These new models provide more flexibility across the quality-cost curve, allowing developers to choose the right model for their specific needs.

Additionally, the 53 models now support a wider range of platforms, including web, Android, iOS, and Windows, with the ability to take advantage of local hardware when available and fall back on the cloud when needed. This simplifies the process for developers to build applications that can leverage the capabilities of the 53 models across multiple platforms.

GitHub Copilot and Productivity Boosts

Microsoft highlighted the impact of GitHub Copilot, the AI-powered code assistant, on developer productivity. Some key points:

  • GitHub Copilot has been a hit product in the generative AI era, with 1.8 million subscribers across 50,000 organizations.
  • It has fundamentally changed the way developers code, with many now relying on Copilot to generate and augment code, rather than writing from scratch.
  • The introduction of ChatGPT has further accelerated this trend, with developers increasingly leveraging large language models to boost their productivity.
  • Microsoft sees Copilot as a key part of their strategy to integrate AI as a first-class citizen across their platforms and tools.
  • Beyond just coding, Copilot can also act as a meeting facilitator, project manager, and collaborator, automating various productivity tasks.
  • The rapid adoption and innovative use cases developed by developers have surprised even Microsoft, showcasing the transformative potential of generative AI in the hands of creative minds.

Copilot's Versatile Applications and Project Management

Microsoft is positioning Copilot as a versatile AI assistant that can integrate into various aspects of productivity and collaboration. Some key highlights:

  • Copilot can act as a meeting facilitator in Microsoft Teams, creating agendas, tracking time, taking notes, and surfacing important information.
  • It can also function as a project manager, ensuring smooth execution of team projects by tracking action items, addressing unresolved issues, and providing oversight.
  • The ability to seamlessly switch between languages, as demonstrated in the Spanish example, showcases Copilot's multilingual capabilities.
  • Integrating Copilot into core productivity tools like email, documents, and code editors can significantly boost developer and knowledge worker efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and providing contextual assistance.
  • Microsoft emphasizes that Copilot is designed to be a collaborative AI assistant, empowering users rather than replacing them, by augmenting human capabilities across a wide range of applications.

The versatility and deep integration of Copilot into the Windows ecosystem position it as a transformative platform for the future of human-AI interaction and collaboration.

Conversation with Open AI CEO Sam Altman on Model Advancements and Safety

Key points from the conversation:

  • The rapid adoption and meaningful use cases developed by developers for GPT-3 and GPT-4 have been remarkable, far exceeding expectations. People are building things that were never thought possible.

  • The most important thing going forward is that the models will just continue to get smarter and more capable across the board. Each incremental improvement in model quality and robustness has led to significant gains in utility.

  • Speed and cost are also important factors that have seen improvements, with GPT-4 being twice as fast and half the cost of previous models.

  • New modalities like voice are also proving to be valuable additions that will matter a lot as they get integrated.

  • A huge amount of work has gone into ensuring these models are robust and safe enough for widespread deployment, involving multiple teams across research, safety systems, policy, and monitoring. This was critical to move from the research stage to being able to broadly use these models.

  • As the models become more powerful, there will be even more complexity and new research required, especially as the industry moves towards AGI. But the teams at Microsoft and OpenAI are committed to tackling these challenges together.

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