Microsoft Build 2023 recap

Guy Merin

Hello mobile developers,

Microsoft Build 2023 took place last week, with a big focus on AI technologies. You can find the complete catalog of sessions on the Build website, but we’ve selected a few sessions below that cover topics of interest for mobile developers.

The age of AI

These sessions cover some of the high-level concepts and big announcements.

Keynote – Satya Nadella reviews the recent history of Microsoft’s recent AI releases, like GitHub Copilot, Bing, Power Platform, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and more. He also highlights five of the 50+ product announcements planned for Build: bring Bing to ChatGPT, Windows Copilot, Copilot stack and extensibility, plugins work across ChatGPT and Bing, Azure AI Studio including Prompt flow and Azure AI Safety, Microsoft Fabric.

Azure AI Studio features listed as icons: Build models, use your data, vector indexing, Retrieval augmented generation, prompt workflows, and AI safety

The era of the AI copilot – Kevin Scott covers some of the background to Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, including a chat with co-founder Greg Brockman.

Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud – Scott Guthrie and Tomas Domke talk about GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio (including VSCode) developer experience. Includes an example of building an OpenAI plugin, with GitHub Actions for build and deploy, and customer case-studies. Introduces the new Azure AI Studio in a live demo of augmented chat with Prompt flow and addresses Responsible AI using Prompt flow to test for content safety.

State of GPT – OpenAI details the training pipeline of GPT, and a deep dive into how to use GPT with prompting guidance and a discussion of the growing tooling ecosystem.

Shaping the future of work with AI – Rajesh Jha and Panos Panay give a bit more background on the Copilot stack and the development of Microsoft 365 Copilot to address consumer and enterprise needs. Rajesh also covers extensions with Teams and Power Platform, with a live plugin demo. Panos focuses on the Windows Copilot experience, WhatsApp and Camo case studies, and the new Dev Home experience with GitHub Copilot X.

How to…

These sessions contain more developer-focused content and examples. Azure OpenAI services are available across platforms and can be incorporated into Android apps just as easily as Windows or server-based apps. They also touch on ONNX for on-device models (which we covered in some posts earlier this year) and Microsoft Graph (also featured previously on this blog), both of which run on Android.

Getting started with generative AI using Azure OpenAI Service – includes some practical code demos, including Azure OpenAI setup via the portal, using embeddings, and implementing search. It also covers a preview of plugins for Microsoft services like translation, content filters, and managing throughput for large scale AI apps.

Deliver AI-powered experiences across cloud and edge, with Windows – add AI to Windows apps with the ONNX Runtime, including a demo of the developer experience using the Whisper voice recognition model. Introduces “Olive” to build, optimize, and package AI models to consume in your apps (across platforms). Includes demos running on different platforms.

AI made easier: How the ONNX Runtime and Olive toolchain will help you, Q&A – this is a Q&A session following the AI-powered experiences session (above) and includes references at onnxruntime.ai/build2023. Although this session is Windows-focused, ONNX Runtime is cross-platform and also runs on iOS and Android.

Building and using AI models responsibly – Learn how to create AI solutions responsibly, with safety built-in. Discusses the principles of responsible AI, how to identify harm, and build mitigations. Includes a demo of Azure OpenAI Service content filters, the chat playground, prompt flow, and evaluating the effectiveness prompt engineering.

AI Partners

Qualcomm AI Stack for developers and extension to on-device AI – learn more about Qualcomm’s AI strategy and hear some examples being built with Microsoft.

How to build next-gen AI services with NVIDIA AI on Azure Cloud – Hear from NVIDIA about their product plans for supporting AI scenarios, such as traffic management, thread detection, text/speech, healthcare, and more. Also touches on Azure Machine Learning and how it utilizes NVIDIA technology.

Chat with us at droidcon

Come say ‘hi’ at droidcon San Francisco June 8th and 9th – and drop in on the AI for Android on- and off-device session.

droidcon San Francisco logo

Feedback and resources

Find these sessions and more at Microsoft Build 2023.

There is a curated list of training resources for learning about Microsoft AI, which includes documentation, training, and certifications.

If you have any questions, use the feedback forum or message us on Twitter @surfaceduodev.

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