Microsoft Ignite 2023

An exciting introduction to Microsoft Ignite November 15 - 17, 2023. Two themes that I am excited about are the AI and Microsoft Fabric capability. 

Microsoft Ignite 2023: AI transformation and the technology driving change

The full list of changes at Microsoft Ignite are listed in the Microsoft Ignite Book of News.

In the main keynote Satya announced over 100 changes. A few of the announcements discussed in the keynote are mentioned here:

Azure Maia - The Microsoft Cloud accelerator optimized for LLM training and inference

Azure Open AI Service  updates

• GPT-4 Turbo - Preview
• GPT-4 Turbo with Vision - Preview
• DALL-E 3 - Preview
• Fine Tuning - Preview

Model catalog - New

• Stable Diffusion
• Code Llama
• Mistral 7B
• NVIDA Nemotron-3 8B

Models as a Service - announcing

• Ready to use APIs
• Hosted finetuning
• Integrated with leading LLM tools

Phi-2 - Announcing

• Built by Microsoft Research
• 2.7 billion parameters
• Common sense, language understanding, and logical reasoning

The Phi-2 model is changing the game in artificial intelligence (AI) and it is designed to make machines think more like humans and do it safely.

Azure AI Studio - Preview

• Unified platform
• Hybrid and sematic search
• Full development lifecycle
• Extends to Windows
• Safe and Responsible AI

The Copilot stack is evolving with greater functionality.

Microsoft Fabric is now generally available, a data platform for the era of AI.

Azure AI Search - Deliver accurate, hyper-personalized responses in your Gen AI applications

There was also announcement of Mesh on Microsoft Teams being generally available. 

• Copilot and avatar
• Immersive spaces
• No-code editor
• Copilot and 3D space

Then finally something different Azure Quantum Elements - purpose built to accelerate scientific discovery.