As we mentioned before, today marks the one-year anniversary of Microsoft’s public announcement of the launch of its generative AI. Thereafter, most of these works were carried out under the Copilot brand. In an interview, Microsoft Executive Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi revealed some of Copilot’s current new features and hinted at future development directions.
One of Microsoft's efforts to improve Copilot is its image creation tool, which recently faced some skepticism when its DesignerAI service was used to create an explicit image of Taylor Swift that later went viral. Today, Mehdi said Copilot's image generation capabilities can now blur the background of AI-generated images. It can also highlight some objects and even add some different effects like pixel art.
Microsoft said today that since its artificial intelligence chatbot was launched to the public a year ago, it has generated 5 billion chat sessions, and about 70% of those chats were for searching for information.
Medi also said that while the Copilot brand has been added to many services over the past year, end users will only see one Copilot. He said that if people want to pay for Copilot Pro or Copilot for Microsoft 365, then Copilot can "add features when you subscribe." In fact, Copilot for Microsoft 365 changed earlier this week, and users can now access it simply through Copilot on their Windows desktop.
In the future, Copilot on Windows will allow owners of PCs equipped with AI-based NPUs to run large language models natively on their systems. Mahdi also said that artificial intelligence can allow Windows PC users to use more functions on their personal computers that they have never used before. He said:It sounds cliché, but I think AI is going to unleash quite a profound impact in terms of people's ability to do amazing things with computers.
While Microsoft has had a busy first year with its AI efforts, we should see the company roll out more Copilot and other generative AI features in its second year and beyond.