🥟 Chao-Down #215 Microsoft begins their "era of Copilot", Be My Eyes AI offers GPT-4-powered support for blind Microsoft customers, YouTube previews AI tool that clones famous singers

Microsoft just had their big Ignite conference for developers and partners and it was huge. A few of the standout announcements for me:

• Microsoft showed off its first custom AI chip for powering AI workloads in the cloud. The Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator was designed to run large language models (LLMs) and speed up AI computing tasks.

• Microsoft unveiled Windows AI Studio, a central hub for developers to access and customize AI models. The platform integrates development tools and models from Azure AI Studio and services like Hugging Face.

• Microsoft has rebranded its Bing chat interface to "Microsoft Copilot," transitioning away from the branding across Bing, Microsoft Edge, and Windows 11. Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise are now simply named "Copilot."

• Microsoft will also support OpenAI's newly launched GPTs. The custom versions of ChatGPT can be created by anyone for personal and work tasks.

With all these new products and features, Microsoft is positioning itself as “the Copilot company” building AI into every part of their ecosystem. You can read the full slate of announcements in the Microsoft Ignite 2023 Book of News.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Microsoft extends generative AI copyright protections to more customers (TechCrunch)

With a systems approach to chips, Microsoft aims to tailor everything ‘from silicon to service’ to meet AI demand - (Microsoft)

YouTube previews AI tool that clones famous singers — with their permission (The Verge)

The copyright conundrum of AI art (The Verge)

Be My Eyes AI offers GPT-4-powered support for blind Microsoft customers (The Verge)

New Open Source AI Model from China Boasts Twice the Capacity of ChatGPT (Decrypt)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

Growth in Early-Stage VS Scale-Up 🥊 (Substack)

Catch me if you can! How to beat GPT-4 with a 13B model (LMSYS Org)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

huggingface/alignment-handbook: Robust recipes for to align language models with human and AI preferences (Github)

reworkd/tarsier: Vision utilities for web interaction agents 👀 (Github)

haoheliu/versatile_audio_super_resolution: Versatile audio super resolution (any -> 48kHz) with AudioSR. (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

An Efficient Self-Supervised Cross-View Training For Sentence Embedding (arxiv)

ADaPT: As-Needed Decomposition and Planning with Language Models (arxiv)

OtterHD: A High-Resolution Multi-modality Model (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android (Ars Technica)

Amazon: Not coming into office limits promotion prospects (The Register)

Facing Financial Run as Costs Soar for Elder Care (The New York Times)

While All Inflation Feels Bad, Housing Inflation Is the Worst - WSJ

American women are outliving men by 6 years since pandemic. But why? (USA Today)

Toyota's Camry, best-selling car in US, goes all-hybrid (Reuters)

One Last Bite 😋

If you want to learn more about building your own Copilots using Microsoft’s Copilot stack and the Semantic Kernel, check out yesterday’s community office hours! We had a great turnout.