As I mentioned earlier, today marks the one-year anniversary of Microsoft announcing its commitment to generative AI. Since then, these efforts have mostly been developed under the Copilot brand. In a new interview with The Verge, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's executive vice president and chief consumer marketing officer, revealed some new features coming to Copilot today, as well as hints at what's to come.
One of Microsoft's big efforts to improve Copilot is the image creation tool. The tool has recently come under some scrutiny over claims that its Designer AI service was used to create explicit images of Taylor Swift that later went viral. Today, Mehdi said Copilot's image generation capabilities can now blur the background of images created by AI. You can also highlight some objects and add various effects such as pixel artwork.
According to Mehdi,
Creating images is one of those things that really resonates with me. I think that's the first step towards unlocking the ability for people to feel like they can be creators again.
Microsoft today announced that its AI chatbot has generated 5 billion chats since its public launch a year ago. Mehdi told The Verge that about 70% of the chats were for information searches.
Mehdi also said that although Copilot branding has been added to many services over the past year, users will ultimately only see one Copilot. He said that if people want to pay for Copilot Pro or Copilot for Microsoft 365, Copilot can just “add features when you subscribe.” In fact, earlier this week his Copilot for Microsoft 365 changed so that users can now easily access it via his Copilot on his Windows desktop.
he added:
So, regarding the concept of your personal co-pilot, we would like to arrive at an idea. And with that, we want to be able to use your personal ID and your work ID to unlock everything you've got with your ID.
The future of Copilot on Windows could allow owners of PCs with AI-based NPUs to run local large-scale language models on their systems. Mehdi also said that AI could allow Windows PC owners to take advantage of more features on their personal computers that they never had access to before. He said::
It sounds like a cliché, but I think what this unlocks is profound in terms of people's ability to do amazing things with computers.
The first year of Microsoft's AI efforts was very busy, but we should expect to see more Copilot and other generative AI capabilities from the company in the second year and beyond.
