Tom Warren

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has just taken the stage at Microsoft’s Ignite event to talk about how the company is partnering with Microsoft on a variety of AI projects. “Generative AI is the single most significant platform transition in computing history,” says Huang. “In the last 40 years, nothing has been this big. It’s bigger than PC, it’s bigger than mobile, and it’s gonna be bigger than the internet, by far.” Nvidia made $6 billion in pure profit earlier this year thanks to the AI boom.

“As OpenAI innovates we will deliver all of that innovation as part of Azure OpenAI,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The latest GPT-4 Turbo model, with lower pricing and extended prompt length, is coming to Azure OpenAI this week in preview. Microsoft is also offering Meta’s Llama 2 model as a service, alongside Mistral and Jais.

Microsoft announced a new Arm-based CPU today, the Azure Cobalt 100. It’s designed for cloud workloads and Microsoft already said it was 40 percent faster than the commercial Arm-based servers it uses today. Now, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says it’s “the fastest of any cloud provider.” The slide behind Nadella narrowed that claim to Arm-based server CPUs. We look forward to the benchmarks in 2024.

Nadella is taking the stage at Microsoft Ignite today, where he’s reflecting on the state of AI just as Microsoft launches new AI chips, rebrands Bing Chat to Microsoft Copilot, and lets anyone create AI copilots. “We’re entering this exciting new phase of AI, where we’re not just talking about it as technology that’s new and interesting, but we’re getting into the details of producing, making, deployment, and safety,” says Nadella. “We’re at a tipping point. This is clearly the age of Copilots.”

Microsoft’s annual IT pro and developers conference, Ignite, is kicking off with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella at 12PM ET / 9AM PT. You can watch the show live over at Microsoft’s Ignite website. The biggest announcements from the show include new Microsoft built CPUs and AI chips, a Bing Chat rebranding to Microsoft Copilot, and a new Microsoft Copilot Studio that lets anyone build custom AI copilots. You can find all of the Microsoft Ignite 2023 news right here.