Microsoft Build

Fluid Framework 2.0 lets multiple people work together in Microsoft’s Notion-like Loop workspaces and turns Office document items like charts, tables, and lists into “Lego pieces” that can be edited in real time from any app.

We saw the video editor’s new feature demoed at Microsoft’s Surface event in Richmond, where new Copilot Plus Surface Laptops and an updated Surface Pro with Qualcomm’s AI-ready chips have been announced.

Native Arm64 versions of Photoshop, Lightroom, Firefly, and Express are available starting today, Adobe announced at the Surface event going on in Richmond right now. Illustrator and Premiere Pro won’t be far behind with June arrivals.

Like many other assistants and AI devices plugged into OpenAI’s latest LLM, Microsoft just announced at today’s Surface event that Copilot will soon be plugged into GPT-4o (and powered by new Surface Plus PCs). They demonstrated the integration by showing Copilot guide a player through Minecraft, using GPT-4o to see and react to what was happening onscreen.

What is the company announcing one day ahead of Google’s presumably AI-heavy I/O 2024 event tomorrow? According to Sam Altman, what OpenAI has in store is not the rumored search engine or GPT-5 updates, but we’ll find out what it really is at 1PM ET / 10AM PT.

It’s been a long time coming but Microsoft Teams avatars are finally here. The avatars will work on Windows PCs or Macs, allowing Teams users to create a 3D avatar to use in meetings instead of being on camera or even needing a webcam. Microsoft also has its immersive spaces for Microsoft Teams in private preview now.

Microsoft Fabric is a data analytics platform. It’s probably one of the biggest data product announcements from the software giant since SQL server. It’s designed to pull data from Microsoft’s OneLake data lake, Amazon S3, and even Google Cloud soon. Microsoft has even added an AI Copilot to Microsoft Fabric, too.

A big part of Microsoft’s announcements at Build this year is OpenAI interoperability for Bing plug-ins, Microsoft Copilot plug-ins, and ChatGPT plug-ins. This means developers and users can create plug-ins that work across multiple chatbots, thanks to Microsoft’s close partnership with OpenAI. Read more about it here.

Bing will now be the default search engine in OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI chatbot. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella demonstrated how it works on stage at Microsoft Build today. “This is just the start of what we plan to do with our partners in OpenAI to bring the best of Bing to the ChatGPT experience,” says Nadella. Read more about how it works here.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is on stage discussing platform shifts and recounting memories of previous tech changes. For Microsoft this year’s Build is all about artificial intelligence. You can watch the keynote right here or check out the latest announcements from Microsoft Build right here.

Ahoy, matey! Microsoft is finally adding in native RAR support into Windows 11. While you’ve been able to open ZIP files for years in Windows, WinRAR or something similar was always required for RAR files. Archive formats like tar, 7-zip, RAR, gz and many others will now be supported using the libarchive open-source project.

Microsoft announced an AI “personal assistant” for Windows 11 earlier today. Windows Copilot already looks like it will be the star of Microsoft Build. It’s integrated right into Windows 11 and available to open from the taskbar across all apps to summarize documents, help control system settings, and much more. Check out our full article on Windows Copilot here.

So we know Panos Panay is pumped once again, but he’s also holding a session at Microsoft Build tomorrow on “shaping the future of work with AI.” This could be where we get to hear more about the future of Windows with AI, and who knows maybe even a Windows 12 teaser? Maybe? Hmm?

Microsoft’s Windows and Surface chief, Panos Panay, is getting ready to talk onstage at the company’s Build event this week. Such an event can only mean one thing for Panay: he’s PUMPED. Given Panay said at CES earlier year “AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows,” there might be good reason to be pumped. Panay has been in a constant state of pumped for more than a decade now. Stay tuned for all of our Build coverage. Soon.

It looks like Microsoft is holding its annual Build developers conference in May again this year. Twitter leaker h0x0d has published a marketing image of the Build dates, with an in-person element in Seattle between May 23rd and May 25th. Build 2022 also took place in late May, but the in-person part was very limited. We’ll likely hear a lot about Microsoft’s AI product plans at this year’s event.