Microsoft adds OpenAI technology to Word and Excel

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2 years ago

March 16, 2023

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Microsoft is bringing generative artificial intelligence technologies such as the popular ChatGPT chatting app to its Microsoft 365 suite of business software.

The enterprise technology giant said Thursday that the new A.I. features, dubbed Copilot, will be available in some of the company’s most popular business apps like Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

The Copilot technology is built upon a type of artificial intelligence software known as a large language model, or LLM. Researchers have improved the capabilities of LLMs in recent years to become more capable of understanding and responding to text.

The technology industry has been captivated by the rise of generative artificial intelligence technologies, best exemplified by LLMs that can do tasks like create images based on written prompts and carry on extended conversations with people via chat interfaces.

“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface—natural language.”

Microsoft is pitching the Copilot features as being more powerful than simply being “OpenAI’s ChatGPT embedded into Microsoft 365,” the company said in an announcement. The company said that the new Copilot in Word feature will give people a “first draft to edit and iterate on—saving hours in writing, sourcing, and editing time.”

However, Microsoft added that “Sometimes Copilot will be right, other times usefully wrong,” acknowledging that current LLM technology can produce inaccurate responses. For instance, the company’s recent debut of a new generative AI-powered Bing chat tool sometimes produced responses containing factual inaccuracies and occasionally eerie dialogue.

Microsoft executives demonstrated some of the capabilities of its Copilot tool on Thursday during an online presentation.

Family members can more quickly create celebration plans and generate accompanying PowerPoint slides that use imagery spooled from a person’s Microsoft OneDrive storage account for compelling visuals. Business leaders can more easily create emails and send business proposals using the new tools, Microsoft said.

Jared Spataro, a Microsoft corporate vice president of modern work and business applications, said Copilot is able to scan and take actions based on all the data from the Microsoft Graph, which stores content like emails, file meetings, chats and calendar notes. This Microsoft Graph data helps make Copilot’s underlying large language model generate more specific and improved responses tailored to an individual.

Microsoft did not say specifically when the new AI copilot features would debut and what the pricing would be, only saying that “In the months ahead, we’re bringing Copilot to all our productivity apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Viva, Power Platform, and more.”

The company added that it’s testing Copilot “with a small group of customers to get feedback and improve our models as we scale,” but did not disclose the name of the customers testing the software. A Microsoft spokesperson added in an email that the company “is testing Copilot with 20 customers, including eight in the Fortune 500.”

Jaime Teevann, a chief scientist and technical fellow at Microsoft, said that Copilot passed several privacy checks and has “mitigations in place” in the case the software “gets things wrong or has biases or is misused.”

“We’re going to make mistakes, but when we do, we’ll address them quickly,” Teevann said.

Much of the excitement over generative AI is due to the seemingly overnight success of the ChatGPT tool, which was released by the Microsoft-backed AI firm OpenAI in late November.

Microsoft said in January that it would provide OpenAI a multiyear and multibillion dollar investment, but did not disclose the precise figure.

In February, Microsoft debuted a new version of its Bing search engine that included a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 language technology.

OpenAI publicly revealed its GPT-4 software earlier this week, pitching the technology as a significant improvement over its predecessor, GPT-3, that can produce more creative and accurate text responses.

Watch: Microsoft President Brad Smith says it’s a ‘good day for gamers’

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Microsoft contributes $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund

Published

2 hours ago

January 9, 2025

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Microsoft contributes million to Trump's inauguration fund

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during an American Technology Council roundtable at the White House in Washington on June 19, 2017.

Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images

Microsoft said Thursday that it’s contributing $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.

The software maker is now more closely aligned with its highly valued peers in the technology industry. Google said earlier on Thursday that it’s donating $1 million to the Trump fund, and Meta offered the same amount in December. Amazon was reportedly looking to make a similar contribution.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in December that he would contribute $1 million individually, and Axios reported last week that Apple CEO Tim Cook will do the same.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the world’s richest person, has been advising Trump as he prepares to return to the White House following the inauguration later this month.

Microsoft also contributed $500,000 to the first inauguration fund for Trump’s first term and gave the same amount to President Joe Biden’s fund, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, has met with Trump on multiple occasions, including over negotiations surrounding a possible acquisition of TikTok in the U.S. in 2020. Nadella also joined a Trump roundtable of technology executives from around the country in 2017.

Microsoft is hoping that under Trump, the U.S. will push artificial intelligence policy in a favorable direction.

“The United States needs a smart international strategy to rapidly support American AI around the world,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, wrote in a blog post last week.

WATCH: Microsoft to end 2024 with capital expenditures of at least $53 billion

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Ubisoft appoints advisors to explore strategic options after report on potential buyout

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2 hours ago

January 9, 2025

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Ubisoft appoints advisors to explore strategic options after report on potential buyout

Artwork for Ubisoft’s upcoming “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” game.

John Keeble | Getty Images

French video game publisher Ubisoft said Thursday it’s appointing advisors to review and pursue strategic options after a report last year suggested that its majority backers were considering a buyout.

Ubisoft said in a strategic update that “leading advisors” had been hired to explore “transformational strategic and capitalistic options to extract the best value for stakeholders.”

“This process will be overseen by the independent members of the Board of Directors. Ubisoft will inform the market in accordance with applicable regulations if and once a transaction materializes,” the company said in a statement late Thursday.

In October, Bloomberg News reported that the Guillemot family who founded Ubisoft nearly four decades ago, and Chinese tech giant Tencent were considering a potential takeover of the firm. Shares of Ubisoft skyrocketed more than 30% on the report at the time.

“We are convinced that there are several potential paths to generate value from Ubisoft’s assets and franchises,” Yves Guillemot, co-founder and CEO, said Thursday, addressing the firm’s strategic plan.

The Bloomberg report followed a decision by Ubisoft to delay the release of the latest title in its popular “Assassins Creed” video game series, “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” by three months, to February 2025.

On Thursday, Ubisoft postponed the launch of “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” again, pushing it back to March 20.

Shares of Ubisoft have declined 45% in the past 12 months amid woes surrounding its pipeline of blockbuster title launches, as well as doubts over the company’s strategic direction.

Last year, activist investor AJ Investments called on Ubisoft to sell itself to private equity or Tencent. At the time, the investment firm said it had gained the support of 10% of Ubisoft’s shareholder base for its campaign.

The game maker had also garnered criticisms for plans to include a paid “Season Pass” for its new Assassin’s Creed game, which would have provided gamers access to a bonus quest and additional downloadable content at launch.

After gamers slammed the decision as adopting a “pay-to-play” model, Ubisoft decided to shelve plans for the paid feature.

Ubisoft is under pressure to prove it can turn things around. On Thursday, the company doubled down on a commitment to cut costs, saying it now expects to reach more than 200 million euros ($206 million) of cost reductions by full-year 2025 to 2026 compared to 2022 to 2023 on an annualized basis.

Technology

Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty bids for TikTok ahead of Supreme Court arguments

Published

3 hours ago

January 9, 2025

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Billionaire Frank McCourt's Project Liberty bids for TikTok ahead of Supreme Court arguments

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Just 10 days before the U.S. ban on TikTok goes into effect, businessman Frank McCourt’s internet advocacy nonprofit Project Liberty announced Thursday it has submitted a proposal to buy the social media site from Chinese technology company ByteDance.

Project Liberty and its partners, known as “The People’s Bid for TikTok,” would restructure the app to exist on an American-owned platform and prioritize users’ digital safety, the project said in a statement.

“We’ve put forward a proposal to ByteDance to realize Project Liberty’s vision for a reimagined TikTok – one built on an American-made tech stack that puts people first,” McCourt, Project Liberty’s founder, said in the statement. “By keeping the platform alive without relying on the current TikTok algorithm and avoiding a ban, millions of Americans can continue to enjoy the platform.”

A Project Liberty spokesperson said the nonprofit was not disclosing the financial terms of the offer but confirmed that ByteDance has received the proposal.

CNBC has reached out to TikTok for comment.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the ban, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden last April, on Friday. ByteDance has repeatedly refused to sell TikTok and appealed the legislation on First Amendment grounds.

The case has worked its way through the judicial system. Most recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in favor of the law on Dec. 6, writing that the government’s national security justifications for the ban were sufficiently compelling.

In a Dec. 9 court filing, TikTok said that the ban would cost U.S. small businesses and social media creators $1.3 billion in revenue and earnings in just one month, and that more than 7 million U.S. users do business on TikTok.

The ban, known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, prohibits the distribution and maintenance of the app while it is under Chinese ownership.

The People’s Bid for TikTok aims to migrate TikTok to an open-source platform that allows users more control of their data, as part of Project Liberty’s mission to build a more user-empowered internet.

The initiative partners with investment banking group Guggenheim Securities and law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Its backers include digital safety advocates, investor Kevin O’Leary and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.