CEO Satya Nadella wants to further promote Microsoft's AI development efforts

Microsoft has just released its annual financial report for fiscal year 2023. In it, as usual, CEO Satya Nadella wrote an annual letter to Microsoft shareholders, outlining his comments on market and the company's development direction, as well as sharing future strategies. As expected, Nadella will continue to bet Microsoft's future on the highly innovative field of AI, which he feels 'will fundamentally change the productivity of every individual, organization and individual. industry on Earth'.

In the letter, Nadella wrote:

This next generation of AI will reshape every software category and the way businesses grow, including our own. 48 years after its founding, Microsoft remains one of the most important companies on the planet because time and time again—from PC/Server, to Web/Internet, to Cloud/Mobile—we have adapted well with macro chronic technological paradigm changing trends. Now, we are standing on that threshold again, with the goal of nothing less than becoming the company leading the global AI era.

In his lengthy letter, Nadella gave several examples of how Microsoft's AI products have helped organizations, businesses and even individuals around the world. The CEO cited Latin American online marketplace Mercado Libre's use of GitHub Copilot to help reduce developers' coding time, while efficiency and accuracy remain high. He also mentioned that automaker Mercedes-Benz is testing the use of ChatGPT, powered by Azure OpenAI Service to improve the in-car virtual assistant experience.

Nadella said that the combination of natural language and "new inference engines" helped launch the new era of AI at Microsoft:

These groundbreaking initiatives will open up huge new opportunities. And in fact, just last month we announced our vision for Copilot, an everyday AI companion. We're building Copilot into an essential, most-used experience, while allowing everyone to leverage its power as a standalone app. Just like you boot up an operating system to access applications or use a browser to visit websites today, we believe you can ask Copilot to do all of those operations and more. more: shopping, coding, analyzing, learning, creating.

Nadella's letter also mentioned new products and services that Microsoft has introduced over the past year at. Of course, he also mentioned Microsoft's recent deal to acquire Activision Blizzard for a record $69 billion. This is the largest acquisition in the company's history. However, there is one important thing that Nadella did not mention in his annual report: Microsoft's decision to lay off 10,000 employees in January 2023.

In related news, Microsoft may be about to reveal plans to produce its own AI processor within the framework of the Ignite 2023 developer conference taking place this coming November, according to technology publication The Information. Details about this AI chip have not yet been revealed, only that the expected code name will be Athena, and is specially designed for high-performance data center servers.

Lesley Montoya

Update 25 October 2023