Artificial Intelligence
Not Allen Iverson
buy a windows copilot laptop brehs
Microsoft wants to integrate chatGPT into Bing by the end of March
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buy a windows copilot laptop brehs
Bing previews its answer to Google's AI Overviews | TechCrunch
Microsoft's Bing is preparing to launch an answer to Google's AI Overviews -- an AI-powered, info-summarizing feature called Bing generative search.
techcrunch.com
Bing previews its answer to Google’s AI Overviews
Kyle Wiggers
12:06 PM PDT • July 24, 2024
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Microsoft this afternoon previewed its answer to Google’s AI-powered search experiences: Bing generative search.
Available for only a “small percentage” of users at the moment, Bing generative search, underpinned by a combo of large and small generative AI models (mum’s the word on which models exactly), aggregates info from around the web and generates a summary in response to search queries.
For example, if a user searches “What is a spaghetti western?” Bing generative search will show information about the film subgenre’s history and origin and top examples, along with links and sources that show where those details came from. As with Google’s similar AI Overviews feature, there’s an option to dismiss AI-generated summaries for traditional search from the same results page.
“This is another important step in evolving the search experience on Bing and we’re eager to get feedback throughout this journey,” Microsoft writes in a post on its official blog. “We are slowly rolling this out and will take our time, garner feedback, test and learn and work to create a great experience before making this more broadly available … We look forward to sharing more updates in the coming months.”
Microsoft insists that Bing generative search, which evolves the AI-generated chat answers it launched on Bing in February 2023, “fulfill
Google’s AI Overviews infamously suggested putting glue on a pizza. Arc Search told one reporter that cut-off toes will eventually grow back. Genspark recommends a few weapons that might be used to kill someone. And Perplexity ripped off news articles written by other outlets, including CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes, without giving credit or attribution.
AI-generated overviews threaten to cannibalize traffic to the sites from which they source their info. Indeed, they already are, with one study finding that AI Overviews could negatively affect about 25% of publisher traffic due to the de-emphasis on article links.
For its part, Microsoft insists that it’s “maintaining the number of clicks to websites” and “look[ing] closely at how generative search impacts traffic to publishers.” The company volunteers no stats to back this up, however, alluding only to “early data” that it’s choosing to keep private for the time being.
That doesn’t instill a ton of confidence.
How Microsoft is turning AI skeptics into AI power users
75% of knowledge workers are already using AI at work, and that usage has doubled in the past six months.
venturebeat.com
How Microsoft is turning AI skeptics into AI power users
VB Staff
July 26, 2024 6:50 AM
Since generative AI burst onto the scene in 2023, it quickly swept from personal to workplace use. Microsoft’s global, industry-spanning survey, the 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, found that 75% of knowledge workers are already using AI at work, and that usage has doubled in the past six months. But 78% of that is BYOAI, or workers bringing their own AI tools.
“The challenge for every organization and leader right now — or opportunity — is how to channel that individual enthusiasm and experimentation into business value,” said Colette Stallbaumer, WorkLab Cofounder and Copilot GM at Microsoft, joining VB CEO Matt Marshall onstage at VB Transform.
They spoke about how AI can be effectively integrated at work in a way that drives value for the business and for the employees who use it. It’s all about activating at every level of the organization, from the CEO to all line of business leaders across every function, Stallbaumer explained. As you hunt down the business problems that can most effectively be tackled with AI, it’s about embracing experimentation, identifying AI champions and channeling enthusiasm. Since the launch of Microsoft Copilot, they’ve chased that enthusiasm by continually working to keep customers engaged in an active feedback loop, learning what’s working and how to make the product better.
Adding critical new capabilities to Copilot
Customer feedback has prompted the company to add a number of new capabilities to Copilot and Copilot Lab, including prompts specific to a workplace, function-specific prompts and the ability to share them and reuse prompts. They’ve also stepped up aid in the prompt-writing process, adding both an auto-complete feature and a rewrite feature to get the best possible response. Customers are also now able to schedule prompts to run at certain times of the day, every day.
“When we introduced Copilot, we said, this is the most powerful productivity tool on the planet, and all you need are your own words,” says Stallbaumer. “It turns out that was not entirely true. We’ve learned along the way that one of the hardest things for people to do is change behavior. And in the case of Copilot and these generative AI tools, we are asking people to both create new habits, and break old ones.”
Measuring the impact of gen AI
How do you quantify enthusiasm, or employee productivity and satisfaction? Nailing down metrics, KPIs and benchmarks has generally proven to be a tricky undertaking, across industries. Microsoft has shifted its own approach over the last year, and since the introduction of Copilot. The original focus was on time savings and productivity across all the universal tasks that happen in knowledge work, such as email, writing, meetings and searching for information. What they found is that there was a growing body of evidence, both Microsoft-sourced as well as customer and third-party academic research, all saying a very similar thing: These tools do save knowledge workers anywhere from 20 to 40%. But at the same time, customers were saying they wanted more — they wanted to use these tools to fundamentally change the shape of the business, with metrics centered on real business value.
“In 2024, we’ve pivoted to that goal, which starts with understanding the business problems that AI is best positioned to solve,” Stallbaumer says. “We are working on it now, across every function — like sales, finance, HR, marketing — looking at all of the processes, hundreds of processes, and then [determining] the KPIs within those processes where AI can actually make a difference. That’s how we’re thinking about measurement now.”
For example, Microsoft has one of the largest customer service organizations in the world. They found that when applying Copilot to specific areas of an agent’s workflow, they can resolve cases 12% faster, resulting in happier customers, and requiring about 13% less intervention or peer support to resolve cases.
For the finance team, dealing with accounting and treasury means reconciling many hundreds of accounts a week, consuming a huge number of hours. With Copilot they found that tasks that used to take hours of work can be cut down to about 10 minutes.
“It’s about breaking down knowledge work,” she says. “Every job is a series of tasks, and when you can help people start to think about it that way, you start to think, ‘is this a human-powered task or an AI powered-one, and can I delegate this to AI and then build on that work?’”
The future of work, AI and AI-powered work
“We see knowledge work fundamentally changing, and how people spend their time changing,” Stallbaumer says. “We’re going to see it evolve from where people are rarely doers [and instead are] supervisors of both their own work and also AI-generated output. Things that they can set and forget, if you will, but also where AI will come back to the human and ask for further instructions when needed.”For a salesperson that could mean that backend data entry is taken entirely off their plate in the future, so they can instead focus on the customer relationship. For a finance person, it would enable them to focus on strategically growing the business rather than spending so much of their time on accounts reconciliation.
To get to that future, it’s important to prioritize training, in order to change long-ingrained, pre-AI habits. But Microsoft research shows that even for those using AI, only 39% have received AI training, and only 25% of organizations plan to offer training in the year ahead.
“So that’s our message to customers, that training is important if you want to create that flywheel of usage,” she adds.
Turning skeptics into power users
As their own best customer, they’re currently doing an internal experiment to understand the most effective training interventions, whether its nudges from a manager, or peer-to-peer. The Work Trend Index Annual Report found that organizations across the world have a spectrum of users from the skeptics to the power users, and that matches what they see internally.
The report’s research found that the power users who embrace experimentation are also the type of people who will try again if they don’t get the response they expected, as they do not give up easily. And 90% of those users say AI helps them feel more productive, enjoy their work more and manage their workload so they can focus more easily. They’re also 39% more likely to have heard from their line leader about the importance of using AI to transform their function.
“There’s a great quote from William Gibson: ‘The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,’” Stallbaumer said. “We see that inside Microsoft: functions that are already applying AI to transform in significant ways. It’s going to be a journey.”
What's the hold up? Even Brave browser has a search engine with their "AI" already integrated.
Am super surprised Microsoft allowed ChatGPT to be integrated into Apple's next iPhone
They really should be focused on launching a phone with an OS that rivals iOS and Android, which ChatGPT as the centerpiece. An OS that can essentially let you create your own apps and widgets utilizing the technological intelligence
Am super surprised Microsoft allowed ChatGPT to be integrated into Apple's next iPhone
They really should be focused on launching a phone with an OS that rivals iOS and Android, which ChatGPT as the centerpiece. An OS that can essentially let you create your own apps and widgets utilizing the technological intelligence
Copilot intergraded into Microsoft's eco system is good, it's currently used at my place of work, but as a stand alone product in direct completion with ChatGPT it's trash. It hallucinates way too much.
iceberg_is_on_fire
Wearing Lions gear when it wasn't cool
I was getting some cpe yesterday and today since I'm an active cpa and I was watching these presentations with curiosity because a lot of (smaller) firms are trying to get it popping with AI. We do it on the medical side of things but accounting is all manual. They were talking about a lot of different things though.
Announcing a free GitHub Copilot for VS Code
Announcing a free plan for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code.
Announcing a free GitHub Copilot for VS Code
December 18, 2024 by Burke Holland, @burkeholland
We're excited to announce an all new free plan for GitHub Copilot, available for everyone today in VS Code. All you need is a GitHub account. No trial. No subscription. No credit card required.
Enable GitHub Copilot Free
You can click on the link above or just enable GitHub Copilot right from within VS Code like so...
With GitHub Copilot Free you get 2000 code completions/month. That's about 80 per working day - which is a lot. You also get 50 chat requests/month, as well as access to both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models.
If you hit these limits, ideally it's because Copilot is doing its job well, which is to help you do yours! If you find you need more Copilot, the paid Pro plan is unlimited and provides access to additional models like o1 and Gemini (coming in the new year).
With this announcement, GitHub Copilot becomes a core part of the VS Code experience. The team has been hard at work, as always, improving that experience with brand new AI features and capabilities. Let’s take a look at some of the newer additions to GitHub Copilot that dropped in just the past few months. This is your editor, redefined with AI.
Work with multiple files using Copilot Edits
Copilot Edits is a multi-file editing experience that you can open from the top of the chat side bar. Given a prompt, Edits will propose changes across files including creating new files when needed. This gives you the conversational flow of chat combined with the power of Copilot's code generation capabilities. The result is something you have to try to believe.
Try this: Build a native mobile app using Flutter. I built a game last weekend and I've never used Flutter in my life.
Multiple models, your choice
Whether you're using Chat, Inline Chat, or Copilot Edits, you get to decide who your pair programmer is.
Try this: Use 4o to generate an implementation plan for a new feature and then feed that prompt to Claude in GitHub Copilot Edits to build it.
Custom instructions
Tell GitHub Copilot exactly how you want things done with custom instructions. These instructions are passed to the model with every request, allowing you to specify your preferences and the details that the model needs to know to write code the way you want it.
You can specify these at the editor or project level. We'll even pick them up automatically if you include a .github/copilot-instructions.md file in your project. These instructions can easily be shared with your team, so everyone can be on the same page - including GitHub Copilot.
For example...
<span><span>## React 18</span></span><br><span><span>*</span><span> Use functional components</span></span><br><span><span>*</span><span> Use hooks for state management</span></span><br><span><span>*</span><span> Use TypeScript for type safety</span></span><br><span></span><br><span><span>## SvelteKit 4</span></span><br><span><span>*</span><span> Use SSR for dynamic content rendering</span></span><br><span><span>*</span><span> Use static site generation (SSG) for pre-rendered static pages.</span></span><br><span></span><br><span><span>## TypeScript</span></span><br><span><span>*</span><span> Use consistent object property shorthand: const obj = { name, age }</span></span><br><span><span>*</span><span> Avoid implicit any</span></span><br><span></span>
Try this: Ask Copilot to generate the command to dump your database schema to a file and then set that file as one of your custom instructions.
Full project awareness
GitHub Copilot has AI powered domain experts that you can mention with the @ syntax. We call these, "participants". The @workspace participant is a domain expert in the area of your entire codebase.
GitHub Copilot will also do intent detection (as seen in the video) and include the @workspace automatically if it sees you are asking a question that requires full project context.
Try this: Type /help into the chat prompt to see a list of all the particpants in GitHub Copilot and their various areas of expertise, as well as slash commands that can greatly reduce prompting.
Naming things and other hard problems
They say naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science. Press F2 to rename something, and GitHub Copilot will give you some suggestions based on how that symbol is implemented and used in your code.
Try this: If you don't know what to call something, don't overthink it. Just call it foo and implement it. Then hit F2 and let GitHub Copilot suggest a name for you.
Speak your mind
Select the microphone icon to start a voice chat. This is powered by the free, cross-platform VS Code Speech extension that runs on local models. No 3rd party app required.
Try this: Use Speech with GitHub Copilot Edits to prototype your next app. You can literally talk your way to a working demo.
Be a terminal expert
With terminal chat, you can do just about anything in your terminal. Press Cmd/Ctrl + i while in the VS Code terminal and tell GitHub Copilot what you want to do. Copilot can also explain how to fix failed shell commands by analyzing the error output.
For instance, I know that I can use the ffmpeg library to extract frames from videos, but I don't know the syntax and flags. No problem!
Try this: The next time you get an error in your terminal, look for the sparkle icon next to your prompt. Select it to have GitHub Copilot fix, explain, or even auto-correct the shell command for you.
No fear of commitment
No more commits that say "changes". GitHub Copilot will suggest a commit message for you based on the changes you've made and your last several commit messages. You can use custom instructions for commit generation to format the messages exactly the way you want.
Try this: Go beyond commits. Install the GitHub Pull Requests and Issues extension and you can generate pull request descriptions, get summaries of pull requests and even get suggested fixes for issues. All without leaving VS Code.
Extensions are all you need
Every VS Code extension can tie directly into the GitHub Copilot APIs and offer a customized AI experience. Check out MongoDB with their extension that can write impressively complex queries, use fuzzy search and a lot more...
Try this: Build your own extension for GitHub Copilot using GitHub Copilot! We've created some new tutorials that show you how to build a code tutor chat paricipant or generate AI-powered code annotations.
A vision for the future
This last one is a preview of something we're adding to GitHub Copilot soon, but it's way too cool not to show you right now.
Install the Vision Copilot Preview extension and ask GitHub Copilot to generate an interface based on a screenshot or markup.
Or use it to generate alt text for an image.
Try this: Mock up a UI using Figma or Sketch (or PowerPoint - it's ok if you do that. I do it too). Then use @vision to generate the UI. You can even tell it which CSS framework to use.
Note: Vision is in preview today and requires you to have your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini API key. The key will not be required when we release it as part of GitHub Copilot. Coming Soon!
Keeping up with GitHub Copilot
There's so much more GitHub Copilot we want to show you, but nothing can replace the experience of trying it for yourself. If you're just getting started, we recommend you check out these 3 short videos to bring you up to speed quickly on the Copilot UI, as well as learning some prompt engineering best practices.
We ship updates and new features for GitHub Copilot every month. The best way to keep up with the latest and greatest in AI coding is to follow us on X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and even TikTok. We'll give you the updates as they drop - short and sweet - right in your feed.
And if you've got feedback, we'd love to hear it. Feel free to @ us on social or drop an issue or feature request on the GitHub Copilot extension issues repo.
GitHub Copilot in other places
As part of the free tier, you will also be able to use GitHub Copilot on GitHub.com.
While we work with GitHub to build the Visual Studio Code experience, Copilot itself is not exclusive to VS Code. You may be wondering about editors like Visual Studio. Will those users get a free Copilot offering as well?
Yes. Absolutely. Check out this blog post from the VS team on what works today and what’s coming shortly.
The AI code editor for everyone
2025 is going to be a huge year for GitHub Copilot, now a core part of the overall VS Code experience. We hope that you’ll join us on the journey to redefine the code editor. Again.
Enable GitHub Copilot Free
Happy Coding!
Burke Holland @burkeholland
If they were smart , they would ditch the "bing" name entirely. The brand is trash.
They would get much more traction if the renamed the search engine gpt. People look to gpt for answers with the same fervor we had for Google in the early 00s, so chatgpt should be the focus point.
They would get much more traction if the renamed the search engine gpt. People look to gpt for answers with the same fervor we had for Google in the early 00s, so chatgpt should be the focus point.
