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Microsoft to skill 2 mn Indians in AI

Cloud will be foundational to scaling India's digital journey: Satya Nadella

As part of the initiative, Microsoft will raise awareness of responsible AI use and AI-enabled careers for 400,000 students in schools in remote and tribal regions, enabling them to be next-generation AI innovators…reports Asian Lite News

In a significant skilling initiative in India, Microsoft aims to equip 2 million people with AI skills by 2025.

The initiative called ADVANTA(I)GE INDIA is part of Microsoft’s ‘Skills for Jobs’ program, which is designed to empower India’s workforce with future-ready skills.

The initiative is part of Microsoft’s broader commitment to accelerate India’s AI transformation. The skilling initiative is aligned with the company’s responsible AI principles, and training will be delivered in partnership with governments, nonprofit and corporate organizations, and communities.

Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, who is in India this week, announced at an event on Wednesday that Microsoft will equip 2 million people with AI skills in India by 2025.

According to Microsoft’s recent Work Trend Index, 90 percent of Indian leaders say the people they hire will need new skills to prepare them for the growth of AI. Furthermore, 78 percent of Indian workers say they don’t have the right AI capabilities to complete their current work.

To address this needs gap, ADVANTA(I)GE INDIA will focus on training individuals in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, as well as rural areas, enabling people to participate in the new era of AI and unlock inclusive socio-economic progress.

“The ADVANTA(I)GE INDIA initiative is a significant step towards democratizing access to AI skills across the nation and reflects Microsoft’s deep commitment to enabling inclusive growth with technology,” said Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia.

“India has a huge opportunity to be a global leader in AI, and creating AI fluency at scale is a critical step in that journey. This initiative aims to propel India into a promising era of AI fluency, empowering citizens across India with the right skills to thrive in the age of AI.”

The ADVANTA(I)GE INDIA initiative will focus on three key areas to create AI fluency – Equipping India’s future workforce, upskilling government officials in AI and working to build the AI capability of nonprofit organizations.

To deliver ADVANTA(I)GE INDIA, Microsoft will partner with India’s Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and 10 state governments to provide basic and advanced training in AI to 500,000 students and job seekers in 100 rural vocational education institutions and training centers.

This will expand on Microsoft’s existing collaboration with the ministry to train young people in digital and cybersecurity skills.

In addition, Microsoft will provide in-depth AI technical skills training for 100,000 young women through 5,000 trainers at higher education institutions in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

As part of the initiative, Microsoft will raise awareness of responsible AI use and AI-enabled careers for 400,000 students in schools in remote and tribal regions, enabling them to be next-generation AI innovators.

Microsoft will strengthen its partnership with India’s National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building, equipping 250,000 government officers with essential knowledge of generative AI and increasing their AI fluency.

It will enable 2,500 nonprofits and nongovernment organizations to leverage AI skilling resources and technologies to further train 750,000 learners – including underserved youths, young women, and jobseekers – in AI fluency and technical skills.

Over the past three years, Microsoft has provided more than 5,000 nonprofits in India with relevant, affordable, and innovative cloud and technology solutions. It has also helped more than 20,000 nonprofit employees use technology to accelerate their mission.

Microsoft entities in India have over 23,000 employees engaged in sales and marketing, research, development, customer support, and industry solutions across 10 Indian cities – Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, New Delhi, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Noida, and Pune.

Microsoft offers its global cloud services from local datacenters to accelerate digital transformation across Indian startups, businesses, and government organizations.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella announced that Microsoft will provide 2 million people in India with AI skilling opportunities by 2025, to help close skills gaps and strengthen India’s ability to thrive in the AI era.

“India is uniquely positioned to make the promise of AI a reality. We are committed to partnering broadly across the public and private sector to help close the nation’s AI skills gap and create new opportunities throughout the country,” Nadella told the gathering.

Nadella highlighted how Microsoft Copilot, along with the company’s other AI solutions, is driving measurable productivity gains for people and organisations by helping them complete work faster and with superior quality.

Many organisations in India are already accelerating innovation using Copilot for Microsoft 365 and GitHub Copilot, like Axis Bank, Infosys, HCL Tech, LTIMindtree and others.

Microsoft said that organisations in India are seeing an average $3.86 return for every US dollar spent on AI projects, and more than 150 organisations are already innovating with Azure OpenAI Service across industries such as agriculture, aviation, ecommerce, and fast-moving consumer goods.

Air India, the flag carrier airline, deployed a generative AI virtual agent called AI.g. It has successfully answered over half a million customer queries since its launch in March 2023, and manages over 6,000 queries a day in four languages.

With its fourth data centre region set to go live soon, and data centres in collaboration with Jio, Microsoft boasts more datacenter regions than any other cloud provider in the country.

ALSO READ-Nadella to visit India in Feb, discuss new AI opportunities  

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Microsoft Integrates AI Across Tech Stack

Microsoft now has 53,000 Azure AI customers and over one-third are new to Azure over the past 12 months….reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft is integrating the power of AI across the entire data and tech stack, seeing increased usage from AI-first start-ups and some of the world’s largest companies, the company’s Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has said.

More than 2,30,000 organisations have already used AI capabilities in Power Platform, up over 80 per cent quarter over quarter, and with Copilot Studio, organisations can tailor Copilot for Microsoft 365 or create their own custom Copilots.

“It is already being used by over 10,000 organisations, including An Post, Holland America, PG&E. In just weeks, for example, both PayPal and Tata Digital built copilots to answer common employee queries, increasing productivity and reducing support costs,” Nadella told analysts during the company’s earnings call late on Tuesday.

A growing body of evidence makes clear the role AI will play in transforming work.

“Our own research, as well as external studies, show as much as 70 per cent improvement in productivity, using generative AI for specific work tasks, and overall early Copilot for Microsoft 365 users were 29 per cent faster in the series of tasks, like searching, writing, and summarizing,” Nadella informed.

“We’re also seeing a Copilot ecosystem begin to emerge with ISVs like Atlassian, Mural, and Trello, as well as customers like Air India, Bayer, and Siemens have all built plug-ins for specific lines of business that extend Copilot’s capabilities,” he added.

Microsoft now has 53,000 Azure AI customers and over one-third are new to Azure over the past 12 months.

“Our new models-as-a-service offering makes it easy for developers to use LLMs from our partners, like Cohere, Meta, and Mistral, on Azure without having to manage underlying infrastructure,” said Nadella.

The company has added support for OpenAI’s latest models, including GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4 with Vision, DALL-E 3, as well as fine-tuning.

“Over half of the Fortune 500 use Azure OpenAI today, including Ally Financial, Coca-Cola, and Rockwell Automation,” he informed.

The company has also introduced Copilot as a stand-alone destination across all browsers and devices, as well as a Copilot app on iOS and Android.

“And just two weeks ago, we introduced Copilot Pro, providing access to the latest models for quick answers and high-quality image creation and access to Copilot for Microsoft 365 personal and family subscribers,” Nadella said.

Microsoft’s Net Income Up 33%

Microsoft posted $62 billion in revenue and a net income of $21.9 billion during the quarter that ended December 31. Revenue was up 18 per cent and net income increased by 33 per cent.

Microsoft completed the acquisition of gaming company Activision Blizzard on October 13, 2023.

Xbox content and services revenue increased 61 per cent, driven by 55 points of net impact from the Activision acquisition.

Microsoft said the net impact from the Activision Blizzard acquisition was just over $2 billion in revenue. Microsoft also laid off 1,900 workers in its gaming division earlier this month — primarily affecting Activision Blizzard employees.

Revenue in productivity and business processes was $19.2 billion and increased 13 per cent for the quarter.

LinkedIn revenue increased 9 per cent. However, devices revenue decreased 9 per cent for the quarter.

“We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft. “By infusing AI across every layer of our tech stack, we’re winning new customers and helping drive new benefits and productivity gains across every sector.”

Strong execution by our sales teams and partners drove Microsoft Cloud revenue to $33.7 billion, up 24 per cent year-over-year, added Amy Hood, executive vice president and CFO of Microsoft.

Microsoft 365 Consumer subscribers have now reached 78.4 million, nearly 16 per cent up year-over-year.

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Microsoft Teams suffers mega outage

There were reports of Teams users not being able to log into at all, while others saw missing messages, missing attachments, delays and more...reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft Teams experienced a mega outage in several parts of the world, and the company saw “significant improvements or full remediation in many of the Teams features affected by this incident” after hours.

The spike in problem reported by DownDetector suggested that Teams outage, which started Friday evening, went on till early Saturday morning. The company identified “a networking issue impacting a portion of the Teams service,” and began failovers to resolve the problem. “We’re closely monitoring the fixes and workstreams to address any remaining impact scenarios associated with this event,” the company posted on X in its latest update.

There were reports of Teams users not being able to log into at all, while others saw missing messages, missing attachments, delays and more. Microsoft earlier reported that “Our failover operation did not provide immediate relief to all end users in North and South America regions.” “Our network and backend service optimisation efforts are ongoing, and we’re monitoring positive internal telemetry signals to confirm that our mitigations are effectively reducing the impact to customers,” said the company. The company continued work to failover service traffic in all affected regions to remediate impact. Microsoft Teams had a four-hour outage exactly a year ago.

ALSO READ-Microsoft testing way to automatically launch Copilot AI

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Microsoft testing way to automatically launch Copilot AI

Microsoft has introduced a new Copilot key to the Windows PC keyboards, which when hit will launch the Copilot in Windows experience, making it easier to use Copilot in your daily life…reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft has said that it is testing a change to Windows 11 that will allow its AI-powered Copilot feature to automatically open when Windows starts on widescreen devices.

The company is testing the update as part of its most recent Dev Channel preview of Windows 11, so testers can provide feedback before the full release.

“We are trying out opening Copilot automatically when Windows starts on widescreen devices with some Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel. This can be managed via Settings > Personalisation > Copilot,” Microsoft said in a blogpost.

Microsoft does not specify what it considers a “widescreen” device, but its Windows 11 setting mentioned that it will launch Copilot “when you’re using a wider screen,” which could refer to ultrawide displays.

“We’re trying this experience out on devices that have a minimum diagonal screen size of 27-inch and pixel width of 1920 pixels and limited to primary display screens in multi-monitor scenarios,” Microsoft said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has introduced a new Copilot key to the Windows PC keyboards, which when hit will launch the Copilot in Windows experience, making it easier to use Copilot in your daily life.

“The Copilot key joins the Windows key as a core part of the PC keyboard and when pressed, the new key will invoke the Copilot in Windows experience to make it seamless to engage Copilot in your day-to-day,” Yusuf Mehdi, Executive Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, said in a blogpost.

ALSO READ-EU joins UK regulators in examining $13 bn Microsoft-OpenAI deal

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Authors sue Microsoft, OpenAI for copyright infringement

San Altman-run OpenAI and Microsoft have been hit by another class-action lawsuit by book authors, who alleged that the company “simply stole” their copyrighted works to help “build a billion-dollar artificial intelligence system”.

The lawsuit was filed in the Manhattan federal court late on Friday by non-fiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage, reports NBC. Basbanes and Gage seek to represent a class of writers “whose copyrighted work has been systematically pilfered by” Microsoft and OpenAI.

“They’re no different than any other thief,” the lawsuit alleged, adding that it will include all people in the US “who are authors or legal beneficial owners” of copyrights for works that have or are being used by the defendants to “train their large language models”.

The lawsuit seeks damages of up to $150,000 for each work that the defendants infringed, the report mentioned.

The lawsuit alleged that OpenAI’s system relies on being trained by ingesting “massive amounts of written material,” which includes books written by Basbanes and Gage. Microsoft or OpenAI were yet to comment on the new lawsuit.

In September last year, the Authors’ Guild and 17 well-known authors like Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult filed a lawsuit in the Southern district of New York against OpenAI.

According to the complaint, OpenAI “copied plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration” and fed the copyrighted materials into large language models.

In the same month, authors Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman alleged in a lawsuit that OpenAI benefits and profits from the “unauthorised and illegal use” of their copyrighted content.

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Microsoft launches robust AI ‘small language model’ for researchers

Phi-2 is an ideal playground for researchers, including for exploration around mechanistic interpretability, safety improvements, or fine-tuning experimentation on a variety of tasks…reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft has released its newest compact “small language model” titled Phi-2 that continues to perform at par or better than certain larger open-source Llama 2 models with less than 13 billion parameters.

Over the past few months, the Machine Learning Foundations team at Microsoft Research has released a suite of small language models (SLMs) called “Phi” that achieve remarkable performance on a variety of benchmarks.

The first model, the 1.3 billion parameter Phi-1 achieved state-of-the-art performance on Python coding among existing SLMs (specifically on the HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks).

“We are now releasing Phi-2, a 2.7 billion-parameter language model that demonstrates outstanding reasoning and language understanding capabilities, showcasing state-of-the-art performance among base language models with less than 13 billion parameters,” the company said in an update.

Phi-2 is an ideal playground for researchers, including for exploration around mechanistic interpretability, safety improvements, or fine-tuning experimentation on a variety of tasks.

“We have made Phi-2 available in the Azure AI Studio model catalog to foster research and development on language models,” said Microsoft.

The massive increase in the size of language models to hundreds of billions of parameters has unlocked a host of emerging capabilities that have redefined the landscape of natural language processing.

However, a question remains whether such emergent abilities can be achieved at a smaller scale using strategic choices for training, e.g., data selection.

“Our line of work with the Phi models aims to answer this question by training SLMs that achieve performance on par with models of much higher scale (yet still far from the frontier models),” said Microsoft.

The company has also performed extensive testing on commonly used prompts from the research community.

“We observed a behaviour in accordance with the expectation we had given the benchmark results,” said the tech giant.

ALSO READ-Microsoft to invest $3.2 bn in UK to drive future AI growth

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Microsoft-OpenAI Partnership Faces Scrutiny

There have recently been a number of developments in the governance of OpenAI, some of which involved Microsoft…reports Asian Lite News

The UK’s competition regulator will look into the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, including recent developments, to understand the impact the merger could have on competition in the UK.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is examining whether Microsoft’s association with OpenAI could affect the artificial intelligence (AI) market.

“The Invitation to Comment (ITC) is the first part of the CMA’s information gathering process and comes in advance of any launch of a formal phase 1 investigation,” the market watchdog said in a statement.

There have recently been a number of developments in the governance of OpenAI, some of which involved Microsoft.

In light of these developments, the CMA is now issuing an ITC to determine whether the Microsoft /OpenAI partnership, including recent developments, has resulted in a relevant merger situation and, if so, the potential impact on competition.

Last month, OpenAI board sacked CEO Sam Altman in a dramatic move, Later, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella offered him a job to lead its advanced AI research.

Finally, OpenAI reinstated Altman at the helm, with an entirely new board, thus ending an intense drama.

There are speculations on why Altman was fired in the first place, but nothing concrete has come out as the new board is reviewing the whole saga.

According to the CMA, the speed at which AI is scaling across use cases and markets is unrivalled in economic history, while advances in powerful foundation models (FMs) mean that this is a pivotal moment in the development of this transformative technology.

“Critical among these is the need for sustained competition between AI developers which will help to deliver innovation, growth and responsible practices across the sector, as well as the need for open and effective competition in the deployment of FMs across a range of downstream activities,” said the CMA.

The CMA will review whether the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership has resulted in an acquisition of control — that is, where it results in one party having material influence, de facto control or more than 50 per cent of the voting rights over another entity — or change in the nature of control by one entity over another.

“The invitation to comment is the first part of the CMA’s information gathering process and comes in advance of launching any phase 1 investigation, which would only happen once the CMA has received the information it needs from the partnership parties,” said Sorcha O’Carroll, Senior Director for Mergers at the CMA.

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Microsoft to invest $3.2 bn in UK to drive future AI growth

Since then, the UK regulator waved through a restructured version of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, putting Britain back in Microsoft’s favour…reports Asian Lite News

Microsoft’s plan to pump 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) into Britain over the next three years, its single largest investment in the country to date, will underpin future growth in artificial intelligence (AI), the UK government said.

Britain, where the economy is forecast to be sluggish in the coming years, is pushing for private investment to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth industries like AI.

The funding, first announced at a summit hosted by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday, will more than double Microsoft’s datacentre footprint in Britain, providing the infrastructure crucial for new AI models to work.

“Today’s announcement is a turning point for the future of AI infrastructure and development in the UK,” Sunak said in a statement on Thursday.

Microsoft’s plan comes despite comments by its president Brad Smith in April that a decision by the country’s antitrust regulator that went against the US company put the tech industry’s confidence in Britain at risk.

Since then, the UK regulator waved through a restructured version of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, putting Britain back in Microsoft’s favour.

“Microsoft is committed as a company to ensuring that the UK as a country has world-leading AI infrastructure,” Smith said in the statement released as he hosted finance minister Jeremy Hunt at a datacentre being constructed in north London.

As part of the deal announced on Thursday, Microsoft will bring more than 20,000 of the most advanced Graphics Processing Units to Britain, tech which is key to machine learning and developing AI, the government statement said.

The investment includes a training plan to help ensure Britons have the skills they need to build and work with AI, it added.

ALSO READ-Microsoft on OpenAI Board, Altman Takes Charge

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Microsoft on OpenAI Board, Altman Takes Charge

OpenAI’s new board consists of chair Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo, the only remaining holdout from the previous board….reports Asian Lite News

Sam Altman has officially returned to OpenAI as CEO after an intense drama earlier this month, with Microsoft getting a non-voting observer seat on the company’s board.

OpenAI’s new board consists of chair Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo, the only remaining holdout from the previous board.

Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, with a 49 percent stake in the for-profit entity that the nonprofit board controls, reports The Verge.

In a memo to employees, Altman said that he harbours “zero ill will” towards Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist who was behind Altman’s ouster.

“While Ilya will no longer serve on the board, we hope to continue our working relationship and are discussing how he can continue his work at OpenAI,” Altman said in the memo.

“The fact that we did not lose a single customer will drive us to work even harder for you,” he told employees.

He said that OpenAI will advance research plan and further invest in its full-stack safety efforts.

“Our research roadmap is clear; this was a wonderfully focusing time. I share the excitement you all feel; we will turn this crisis into an opportunity! I’ll work with Mira (Murati) on this,” Altman said.

OpenAI board chair Taylor told employees that they are thrilled that “Sam, Mira and OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman are back together leading the company and driving it forward”.

“We will build a qualified, diverse board of exceptional individuals whose collective experience represents the breadth of OpenAI’s mission – from technology to safety to policy. We are pleased that this Board will include a non-voting observer for Microsoft,” he added.

Altman was earlier fired as CEO of OpenAI, the developer of AI chatbot ChatGPT, and the earlier board had said it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

Later, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella announced to hire Altman and Brockman to help the company pursue its advanced AI dreams with a new vertical.

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Nadella Welcomes Altman and Brockman to Microsoft

On Friday, Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, the organization responsible for ChatGPT, made a sudden and unexpected departure…reports Asian Lite News

In a statement on Monday, Microsoft Corporation’s Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, announced that Sam Altman, recently removed as OpenAI CEO, along with Greg Brockman and their team, will be joining Microsoft to spearhead a new research team focused on advanced AI..

“We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners,” Nadella posted on his X timeline.

“We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them,” Nadella tweeted.

Shear has reportedly been appointed as OpenAI’s interim CEO.

“We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”

Cloud will be foundational to scaling India’s digital journey: Satya Nadella

On Friday, in a surprising move, Altman the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, left the artificial intelligence company and resigned from its board with immediate effect. This unexpected departure sent shock waves through the technology industry.

The company had in a blog post on Friday announced that OpenAI’s board no longer has confidence in Altman’s ability to lead the organisation.

The blog post also announced that Greg Brockman, another co-founder of OpenAI, would step down as the chair of the company’s board but remain with the organisation.

The post said that Altman’s departure came after “a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, major tech companies have strived to compete with OpenAI, and world leaders have sought Altman’s insights and investments.

Originally established as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI aimed to prevent advanced AI from falling into the hands of monopolistic corporations. However, after receiving a significant investment from Microsoft in 2019, the company transitioned to a for-profit structure. (ANI)

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