Microsoft Launches Microsoft 365 Copilot

March 17, 2023

March 17, 2023

⚡ Today’s Highlights

  • 📰 News: Microsoft introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot, your AI assistant for work

  • 💰 Funding: Nimble, Fairmatic, Seldon, and CAST AI

  • 🦾 Tools: GPT-4 powered recruiting on LinkedIn and an AI that creates mini-courses from a simple idea

  • 📅 Events: NVIDIA GTC starts on Monday, register today for free!

📰 Today's Top Stories

 * We're trying a new format for the news, let us know what you think * 

(7 min read) (Source: Microsoft)

TLDR: Yesterday, Microsoft announced the next step of integration of Open-AI’s GPT-4 into their suite of tools with 365 Copilot.

  • Copilot is a new AI-powered tool that combines large language models (LLMs) with business data and Microsoft 365 apps to enhance workplace productivity.

  • The tool is an entirely new way of working that offers two main experiences.

    • Firstly, it is integrated into Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

    • Secondly, it offers an entirely new experience called Business Chat, which uses natural language prompts to generate status updates based on a customer's emails, chats, meetings, and contacts.

  • The Copilot is designed to assist users in generating documents, emails, presentations, and more, using GPT-4 from OpenAI. It will appear in the sidebar as a chatbot, allowing users to summon it to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or help use features like PivotTables in Excel.

  • Copilot is currently being tested by a small group of select users from 20 different companies including 8 in the Fortune 500 before it is rolled out to the public.

  • Like all tools based on GPT and other LLMs, Copilot won't always be correct, but it is definitely an upgrade from looking at a blank screen with a blinking cursor trying to figure out how to start.

(5 min read) (Source: CNBC)

TLDR: Baidu unveiled its AI-powered chatbot called Ernie Bot today. The presentation was an hour long and only showed brief videos of Ernie carrying out mathematical calculations, speaking in Chinese dialects, and generating videos and images with text prompts.

  • Investors were disappointed with the pre-recorded video demonstrations and lack of a public launch, causing a 6.4% drop in shares and a $3 billion market valuation loss.

  • During the presentation at Baidu's Beijing headquarters, CEO Robin Li cautioned that Ernie Bot is not perfect, but it was unveiled because of market pressure.

  • Ernie Bot will be available for trial to an initial group of users with invitation codes, while companies can apply to embed the bot into their products via Baidu's cloud platform.

  • Baidu prioritizes access to Ernie Bot for 650 ecosystem business partners, including media companies, banks, and car firms. Users of its AI cloud can apply for access to Ernie Bot's API. Within an hour of the announcement, Baidu announced that 30,000 corporate clients had joined the waitlist for access to the chatbot.

  • Kai Wang, an analyst from Morningstar, said that the presentation was more of a scripted monologue than an interactive session and there was no soft launch date, leading to negative sentiments.

(10 min read) (Source: GOV.UK)

TLDR: The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered his Spring Budget to the House of Commons, laying out his fiscal plans for the next financial year.

  • The government revealed a quantum strategy to become a world-leading quantum-enabled economy by 2033 with a research and innovation program totalling £2.5 billion. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology will play an essential role in delivering the commitments.

  • The UK government will also allocate £900 million towards the creation of a new exascale supercomputer and a dedicated AI Research Resource to bolster the competitiveness of UK developers.

  • Exascale computing is a new milestone, meaning a computer can perform over one quintillion simple calculations per second.

  • The development is particularly helpful for researchers who need the significant computing power of such technologies to train intricate AI models, create medications, address climate change issues, and perform other similar tasks.

💰 Funding Alerts

  1. Nimble is an autonomous logistics and AI robotics company that uses machine learning to train its AI to handle products with swappable grippers effectively. They have raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by Cedar Pine with participation from DNS Capital, GSR Ventures, and Breyer Capital, among others. The additional funds will help Nimble build a nationwide network of autonomous 3PL fulfillment centers to achieve their goal of economical 2-day or less delivery.

  2. Fairmatic, an AI-powered commercial auto insurance company, raised $46 million in their Series B led by Battery Ventures, bringing its total financing to $88 million. They plan to use the funds to scale their AI and data science capabilities and open an R&D hub in Israel. Fairmatic's AI-driven underwriting approach unlocks continuous savings opportunities for fleets by monitoring driving events and providing actionable tips to improve risk management, which values responsible driving and promotes safer roads.

  3. Seldon, a machine learning operations platform, has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Bright Pixel, with participation from existing investors AlbionVC, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Amadeus Capital Partners. Seldon uses AI and machine learning to deploy, manage, monitor, and explain ML models at scale, empowering data scientists, ML engineers, and other stakeholders to accelerate the adoption of machine learning. The funds will be used to pioneer a data-centric approach to AI, invest in customer success, and strengthen the global support function.

  4. CAST AI, an intelligent cloud-native automation and cost management startup, has raised $20 million in a funding round led by Creandum, with participation from its original investors. CAST AI uses AI and automation to analyze compute resources and optimize them in minutes, enabling AWS, GCP, and Azure customers to cut their cloud bills in half. With this investment, CAST AI plans to expand its platform capabilities to more cloud-native ecosystems and use cases, while also growing its position as a leading provider of intelligent cloud optimization solutions globally.

🦾 Trending Tools

  • Dover Copilot is an intelligent recruiting assistant powered by GPT-4. With the Recruiting Copilot Chrome Extension, easily find and reach out to candidates on LinkedIn. Copilot finds candidate emails, composes personalized outreach, sends emails and follows up. All responses from interested candidates are delivered straight to your inbox.

  • Mini Course Generator is an AI-powered tool that helps creators generate highly accurate and comprehensive mini-courses. Creators simply provide a description of their idea and some guidance on their profession and target audience. The AI Assistant, which can be easily moderated, then suggests a title and outline before generating a complete mini-course enriched with images, videos, and questions.

  • Chatfuel AI is a chatbot builder that utilizes ChatGPT by Open AI to create human-like AI-empowered chatbots for businesses. It supports popular messaging and website platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Line, and website integrations. The chatbots can inform customers about businesses, recommend products and services, and automate customer support.

  • AdNabu 2.0 is a Shopify app that optimizes product data feeds for various marketing channels like Google Shopping, Facebook, and Tiktok. Its latest feature, powered by OpenAI, suggests longer and optimized product titles that can help improve search rankings.

  • Mimir provides personalized mentorship through AI clones of renowned figures. Users can access these virtual mentors to receive personalized insights and advice.

👀 More Reading

🌎 Fresh Content

1. Jackson Greathouse Fall had a brilliant idea. Turn GPT-4 into a moneymaking machine, but instead of making it an AI assistant, he would be the AI’s assistant. He gave it a budget of $100 and let it come up with a business plan that he would launch. Thus, GreenGadgetGuru.com was born and with it, an internet challenge. Now tons of Twitter users are teaming up with GPT-4 to see which business can generate $100,000 cash in hand the fastest. Check out the Twitter thread and follow along with their progress. (Twitter)

2. MattVidPro AI went over the many new updates to Midjourney and did some testing with V5, along with some comparisons to previous versions. (YouTube)

3. One of the biggest new features that has come from V5: Midjourney can finally create accurate human hands. Before the update, checking the hands was one of the first steps to spotting an AI-generated image because they would often come out looking disfigured. Now, it’s an expert at making hands. Deepfakes just got a whole lot more convincing. Take everything you see with a grain of salt. (Twitter)

4. On the other hand, it still doesn't understand context very well. (Twitter)

🧠 Resources

2. Looking to replace Siri with something even remotely useful like ChatGPT? You're in luck because this step-by-step guide will show you how to do just that on your iPhone (including the latest iPhone 14 Pro). Keep in mind that while ChatGPT can be more useful than Siri for quick answers, it may not be perfect. Longer or more in-depth queries are best suited for a desktop browser and, with all AI chatbots, you should do your own research.

 📅 Upcoming Events

  1. NVIDIA GTC (March 20-23, 2023 / Virtual) explores breakthroughs in AI, accelerated computing, and beyond. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will be sharing the AI technologies affecting every industry–and our everyday lives. Learn what's driving the latest transformations in research, industry, and business—from collaborative virtual worlds and advanced graphics to data science, healthcare, and other critical applications. Choose the sessions you’d like to attend that are being hosted by experts from around the world. Register today for free.

  2. Microsoft Secure (March 28, 2023 @ 8:30 AM PDT / Virtual) presents conversations on the state of the industry between Microsoft leaders helping to deliver the products security teams use daily. Be among the first to see what an AI-powered future means for cybersecurity, and learn new comprehensive strategies to help you protect more with less. Register today to secure your spot.

  3. MemCon (March 28-29, 2023 @ The Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA, USA) is the first memory event focused on end users and systems. MemCon empowers engineers and architects working on memory-constrained problems with peer insights from case studies in genomics, AIML, datacenter, HPC, computational fluid dynamics, in-memory databases, and enterprise knowledge graphs. If you are working on a memory-bound problem, come and unpack it with your peers, meet enterprise data experts, and get your hands on tech demos at the same time. Register your interest today. 

 💼 Jobs

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