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Blog – Page 2419

Google Maps is getting a few new updates, including a social feature that is designed to help people plan and collaborate with their friends. The navigation platform is also adding improved transit directions and emoji reactions.

The new social feature is designed to take planning out of your group chat and into Google Maps. The platform is updating its list feature to make it easier for people to share places, plan with friends and vote on group activities. With this new feature, you’ll be able to create a collaborative list to to start planning a hangout after you share a place in Maps with friends. Everyone in the group can add places they’re interested in visiting, and vote with an emoji, like a heart or a thumbs down.

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Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI technologies, promises to be a big moneymaker for the company, with one analyst predicting that it could generate $10 billion in annualized revenue by 2026. Despite a staggered and somewhat confusing rollout, 40% of companies in the Fortune 100 were testing Copilot by fall, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Forrester predicts, meanwhile, that 6.9 million U.S. knowledge workers will be using some form of Copilot in 2024.

And so Microsoft’s quest to grow the tech continues.

During Ignite 2023, Microsoft took the wraps off of three new Copilot offerings across its software and services portfolio: Copilot for Azure, Copilot for Service and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides. The company also launched Copilot Studio, a new platform that delivers tools for connecting Copilot for Microsoft 365 — the Copilot in apps like Excel, Word and PowerPoint as well as Microsoft’s Edge browser and Windows — to third-party data.

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Most companies developing AI models, particularly generative AI models like ChatGPT, GPT-4 Turbo and Stable Diffusion, rely heavily on GPUs’ ability to perform many computations in parallel make them well-suited to training — and running — today’s most capable AI.

But there simply aren’t enough GPUs to go around.

Nvidia’s best-performing AI cards are reportedly sold out until 2024. The CEO of chipmaker TSMC was less optimistic recently, suggesting that the shortage of AI GPUs from Nvidia — as well as chips from Nvidia’s rivals — could extend into 2025.

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Microsoft launched its big AI push earlier this year as part of its Bing search engine, integrating a ChatGPT-like interface directly into its search results. Now less than a year later, it’s dropping the Bing Chat branding and moving to Microsoft Copilot, the new name for the chat interface you might have used in Bing, Microsoft Edge, and Windows 11.

Microsoft initially talked up the Google search competition for its AI ambitions earlier this year, but it now looks like it has its sights set on ChatGPT instead. The Bing Chat rebranding comes just days after OpenAI revealed 100 million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis. Despite a close partnership worth billions, Microsoft and OpenAI continue to compete for the same customers seeking out AI assistants, and Microsoft is clearly trying to position Copilot as the option for consumers and businesses.

“Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will now simply become Copilot,” explains Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Microsoft 365. The official name change comes just a couple of months after Microsoft picked Copilot as its branding for its chatbot inside Windows 11. At the time it wasn’t clear that the Bing Chat branding would fully disappear, but it is today.

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OpenAI has placed a temporary ban on new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus following a surge in demand for the service.

ChatGPT Plus is the $20 per month, premium version of the now infamous chatbot. It includes a host of extra features, including the recently added GPTs—personalized chatbots that are focused on a specific task, such as teaching you how to play chess or negotiating better business deals.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims a surge in usage of the service since the launch of GPTs and other new features announced at its recent developer conference has forced the company to act.

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Summary: Researchers developed an experimental computing system, resembling a biological brain, that successfully identified handwritten numbers with a 93.4% accuracy rate.

This breakthrough was achieved using a novel training algorithm providing continuous real-time feedback, outperforming traditional batch data processing methods which yielded 91.4% accuracy.

The system’s design features a self-organizing network of nanowires on electrodes, with memory and processing capabilities interwoven, unlike conventional computers with separate modules.

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One of the more unexpected products to launch out of this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference is a tool that can create a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate that avatar saying things that the person didn’t necessarily say.

Called Azure AI Speech text to speech avatar, the new feature, available in public preview as of today, lets users generate videos of an avatar speaking by uploading images of a person they wish the avatar to resemble and writing a script. Microsoft’s tool trains a model to drive the animation, while a separate text-to-speech model — either prebuilt or trained on the person’s voice — “reads” the script aloud.

“With text to speech avatar, users can more efficiently create video … to build training videos, product introductions, customer testimonials [and so on] simply with text input,” writes Microsoft in a blog post. “You can use the avatar to build conversational agents, virtual assistants, chatbots and more.”

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