What is Microsoft's new chatbot feature?

The news is ready, and Microsoft is hogging the headlines. Let’s jump in! 🗞

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MICROSOFT’S NEW VISUAL SEARCH FEATURE 👀

I took a Microsoft Office class once and got an A ... I guess you could say that I “Excelled” at it. 🤓

What’s new? Microsoft announced a significant update to its AI chatbot, Bing Chat: visual search.

How does visual search work? According to the recent release, users now have the capability to submit or upload a photo to Bing Chat via either the desktop platform or the Bing app. Bing Chat will then be able to “understand the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it.”

What’s next for chatbots? While chatbots like Bing Chat have started incorporating image search and image-based responses into their user experience, it appears that prominent text-based chatbots currently lack the capability to generate images autonomously, unlike tools such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2, which possess this functionality. However, there seems to be a race to get this done, as Google has announced that its Bard chatbot is actively working towards implementing this feature in the near future.

MICROSOFT ANNOUNCES NEW AI SUBSCRIPTION 🦾

Tired of staring at a blank Word document or PowerPoint, not sure how to get started? Those days could soon be long over. 📝

What’s happening? Microsoft stock rose 5.8% yesterday after the company announced a new AI subscription service for Microsoft 365.

What is the new subscription? Microsoft will charge a supplementary fee of $30/month for access to generative AI features within its popular tools like Teams, Excel, and Word. This “Copilot subscription” boasts an array of capabilities, including the ability to prioritize incoming emails, provide meeting summaries, analyze spreadsheet data, offer writing suggestions, and aid in presentation design.

What has been the response? The market response has been overwhelmingly positive, as investors see the AI subscription as a game-changer that will further solidify Microsoft's dominance in the productivity software space. This strategic move aligns perfectly with Microsoft's continued commitment to harnessing the transformative potential of AI technology.

1,300+ EXPERTS SAY AI IS A “FORCE FOR GOOD” 🙏

Another boring open letter said more boring things that nobody really cares about that much. But a lot of people are talking about it for some reason. 🤷‍♂️

What happened? An open letter, organized by BCS (the Chartered Institute for IT) and signed by more than 1,300 experts, says AI is a "force for good, not a threat to humanity.”

Why? This letter comes in response to the open letter from a few weeks ago that said AI is an '“existential risk to humanity.” Rashik Parmar, BCS chief executive, said this new open letter shows that much of the tech community—especially the tech community in UK—doesn’t believe the "nightmare scenario of evil robot overlords.”

What does all this mean? AI, like most things, has obvious positive and negative uses. Of course, development and application is growing at a rapid pace and the unknown future can certainly be scary. However, at the end of the day, AI can make life much better if used in positive ways. As a community, we would be wise to celebrate and support these positive uses while trying to strike a balance between promoting powerful innovation and remaining cautious towards the negative effects it might have. 🙂

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