Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I share some takeaways from the Microsoft Ignite conference, which took place last month in Seattle.
Highlights
00:14 — Every year one of the conferences I look forward to most is Microsoft Ignite. That’s where you get the scoop on everything new Microsoft is doing. It’s so popular that it sells out quickly. The great thing is Microsoft makes this event completely free for online viewing.
01:25 — Microsoft’s AI focus has resulted in huge gains. Last week, Bob Evans was diving into the Q3 results and said Microsoft has been bullish in rapidly infusing artificial intelligence across its product portfolio. Partnerships were in the spotlight at Ignite with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang joining Satya Nadella on stage.
02:27 — One big announcement from Microsoft was its entry into the AI hardware market with two products. One is its own custom AI chip, Maia, and the other is an ARM-based CPU called Cobalt.
03:12 — Microsoft has been leveraging brand identity to use that Copilot name across a wide range of applications, from Microsoft 365 productivity apps to Dynamics 365 ERPs, and even Windows 11. Bing Chat, which leverages OpenAI’s GPT and DALL·E, is now called Copilot. We have Copilot Studio, then Security Copilot.
04:23 — Finally, Windows AI Studio. This platform will provide developers with tools and models from Azure AI Studio and integrate services like Hugging Face, which is a collaborative platform providing a wide variety of tools and resources to help developers work with AI.
