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Microsoft Build 2021, the company’s annual developer conference kicked off on Tuesday with the opening speech by CEO Satya Nadella. Like the last one, this year’s three-day event is completely virtual. The software giant made several announcements on day one, including bringing one of the most powerful language models, GPT-3, to its Power platform; new features and tools for Teams developers; introduction of PyTorch Enterprise on Azure; and teased the next generation of Windows.

GPT-3 integration in Power Apps

Last year, Microsoft received an exclusive license to use OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model in its own products and services. Now the software company is bringing GPT-3 to its low-code application development platform – Power Apps.

The artificial intelligence (AI) based features in Power Apps will allow users to simply describe what they want to do using natural language inputs and they will be presented with several Power Fx formulas that can help them build an app. .

“Using an advanced AI model like this can help our low-code tools become even more widely available to an even larger audience by really becoming what we call no code,” Charles said. Lamanna, CVP for Microsoft’s low-code application platform, in a blog Post. “It will allow people to query and explore the data in a way that they literally couldn’t do before, and it will be the magic moment.”

A user who creates an ecommerce application can simply describe “find products whose name begins with ‘children’.” The GPT-3 model then presents options to turn the order into a Power Fx formula, such as “Filter (BC orders’ Left (‘Product Name’, 4) = ‘Kids’), the software giant explained in a report. blog post.

Microsoft Power Fx is based on Microsoft Excel. It is an open-source Power Platform programming language. The company plans to integrate Power Fx into other Power Platform tools, at which time new natural language features powered by GPT-3 will also be developed in those products, he noted.

The AI-powered features in Power Apps will preview by the end of June, Microsoft said.

New features, tools for Teams developers

Microsoft has shared new features and tools for its popular communications platform, Teams, which will enable developers to “build the next generation of collaborative applications for hybrid work.” The platform, which has 145 million daily active users, will benefit from features such as shared stage integration, new meeting event APIs, the extensibility of Together mode, as well as a toolkit. Enhanced Teams for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, and a Developer Portal.

Developers can access the main stage of a Teams meeting using the shared stage integration. This provides a new surface to enable real-time, multi-user collaboration experiences for their meeting applications, such as the whiteboard, design, and project boards, the company said.

New meeting event APIs can help developers automate meeting-related workflows through events. The feature is previewed with the shared stage integration, Microsoft noted. Additionally, the extensibility of Together mode will allow developers to create custom scenes for Teams meetings and share them.

Enhanced Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code simplifies the Teams application development experience by reducing the amount of code needed, providing out-of-the-box integrations with Microsoft Azure, and leveraging data from Microsoft Graph, according to the software giant.

Additionally, the new Developer Portal gives developers a dedicated app management console, available through the web or in Teams, to register and configure apps.

PyTorch Enterprise on Microsoft Azure

PyTorch is an open source deep learning framework used by Microsoft to power some of its products such as Bing and Azure Cognitive Services. Now, by launching PyTorch Enterprise on Microsoft Azure, the company will be able to provide customers with additional benefits, such as priority requests, hands-on support, and solutions for patches, bugs, and security fixes. he stated in a blog post.

Azure is the first cloud to provide enterprise support for PyTorch, the company noted and added that the latest version of PyTorch will be integrated with Azure Machine Learning, along with other PyTorch add-ons for faster inferences.

Microsoft customers with Microsoft Premier and Unified support using PyTorch are automatically eligible for PyTorch Enterprise and can request fixes, according to the company.

Additionally, Azure Machine Learning-managed endpoints, a new ML feature, can help developers and data scientists quickly build and deploy machine learning models, automating the creation and management of machine learning. underlying computing infrastructure, the software company explained.

New generation of Windows

Speaking about Windows in the opening keynote, Nadella said, “In all of the opportunities that I have highlighted today, Windows is implied. It has never been more important.

Since its launch over five years ago, with a free update for millions of Windows users, devices running Windows 10 have continued to grow. Last month, the software giant revealed that there were more than 1.3 billion active devices running Windows 10.

After highlighting some of the benefits of the operating system during the keynote, Nadella said the company will soon share one of the “most important Windows updates of the past decade” which will also open up greater economic opportunities. for developers and creators.

“I have self-hosted it for the past few months and am extremely excited about the next generation of Windows,” he added.