5 new developer opportunities in this AI era

The following is adapted from my remarks at Microsoft Build this morning. 

Developer conferences are special places, especially when platform shifts are in the air. So, it’s exciting to be able to come back to Microsoft Build 2023 with a sense of anticipation that something big is unfolding around us.  

I’ve always loved Steve Jobs’ description of computers as “bicycles for the mind.” It’s a beautiful metaphor, and I think it captures the essence of what computing is. And then, last November, we got an upgrade. With the launch of ChatGPT, computing went from a “bicycle for the mind” to a “steam engine for the mind.”  

And now, as developers, we look forward to what we can do in this new era. Every layer of the technology stack will be changed forever. 

At Build this year, we have more than 50 announcements, and I want to highlight five of them. 

Bringing Bing to ChatGPT 

ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer app we’ve ever seen. And we are now bringing Bing to ChatGPT as the default search experience, so we can provide answers that are timelier, more up-to-date, and grounded by search and web data. We’re excited to launch this integration in ChatGPT Plus starting today and to make it available to the free tier soon. And this is just the start of what we plan to do with our partners at OpenAI to bring the best of Bing to the ChatGPT experience. 

Windows Copilot 

Second, we are bringing Copilot to the biggest canvas of all: Windows. This is going to make every Windows user a power user, helping them take action, customize their settings, and seamlessly connect across their favorite apps: 

Copilot stack and copilot extensibility 

Next, we’ve built our copilots with a common architectural stack, and we are now making it available so that everyone can build their own AI apps and copilots—from the AI infrastructure, to foundation models, to the AI orchestration, all the way up to your copilot and its extensibility.  

Whether it’s ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Microsoft Copilots, or your copilots, they will all share the same extensibility model. This is one of the most powerful things for any developer: to be able to write a plugin once and have it reach billions of users across all of these surface areas.  

And we’re already seeing fantastic momentum:  

Yusuf Mehdi, CVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, showed all of this in action: 

Azure AI Studio 

Our new Azure AI Studio is the full-lifecycle developer toolchain for the new era of AI. You can train your own models, ground AI models—such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4—on your own data, create prompt workflows, and more. It also includes built-in support for AI safety.

We’ve been at work on AI safety for years. We have AI principles, which we have translated into a core set of processes that we implement across our engineering stack, as well as compliance and oversight. But the real priority is to build it throughout the entire toolchain, and that’s what we’re doing with Azure AI Studio: 

Microsoft Fabric 

Every AI app starts with data. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce Microsoft Fabric. It’s the biggest launch of a data product from Microsoft since the launch of SQL Server.

It unifies compute and storage, the product experience, governance, and the business model, across all the different types of analytics workloads. And this unification, at the end of the day, is what I think will fuel the next generation of AI applications: 

*** 

As developers, one of the things that we should ask ourselves is: Why do we build technology?

The positive relationship between technology and economic growth has been evident for a long time. But it’s not just economic growth. We want lifespans to go up. We want education, prosperity, and standard of living to go up—everywhere. That’s why we build. That’s why we innovate. That’s why technology exists. It’s not technology for technology’s sake. It is for that broad impact.

For me, this all came together when I was visiting India earlier this year. I had a chance to see an example of an AI assistant, built on this next-generation AI, that will help Indian villagers gain easier access to government services. It had a profound impact on me. And so, I want to leave you with this video that epitomizes what you, as developers, can do in the days, weeks, months, and years to come: