Dive Brief:
- GitHub is giving its AI-assisted coding tool Copilot an upgrade with OpenAI’s GPT-4, the company announced Wednesday.
- GitHub Copilot X will offer developers access to chat and voice capabilities. The tool can interface with pull requests, the command line and documentation to provide in-line suggestions and answer questions on projects.
- Users can sign up for a technical preview of the new capabilities starting Wednesday, and GitHub will make Copilot X generally available in the coming weeks and months, a company spokesperson said.
Dive Insight:
Microsoft-owned entities such as its cloud service Azure and subsidiary GitHub are reaping the benefits of Microsoft’s multibillion, multiyear partnership with OpenAI, as the GPT-4 framework fuels new capabilities.
Last week, OpenAI announced it was launching GPT-4, a large multimodal language model that expands beyond its predecessor’s text processing capabilities and adds visual recognition. While image processing remains in research preview and is not available to the public, enterprise developers can apply for access to GPT-4.
Microsoft customers can apply for access to GPT-4 in Microsoft’s OpenAI-infused cloud offering, Azure OpenAI Service, the company announced Tuesday.
As vendors implement the latest technology powering generative AI capabilities, enterprise adoption strategies are taking shape.
“With Azure Cognitive Services at the heart of our digital services framework, we have harnessed the transformative power of OpenAI's text and image generation models to solve business problems and build a knowledge hub,” Lokesh Reddy Vangala, senior director of engineering, data and AI at The Coca-Cola Company, said in a Microsoft blog post. “But it is the sheer potential of OpenAI's upcoming GPT-4/ multimodal capabilities that truly fills us with awe and wonder.”
Microsoft also added a Copilot function to Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, the company announced last week. Google added generative AI capabilities to its cloud services, Docs and Gmail, Google announced last week. Google’s capabilities are available to testers in the Google Cloud Innovator community are set for broader release in the future.
Some experts, however, are worried about the ethical use and development of generative AI models.
Reports of Microsoft laying off the ethics and society team within its AI organization have spurred concerns from experts, though the company still has an active Office of Responsible AI.
“As we shared with Platformer, the story as written leaves the impression that Microsoft has de-invested broadly in responsible AI, which is not the case,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email about the reports of layoffs impacting ethics teams at the company. “We have hundreds of people working on these issues across the company, including net new, dedicated responsible AI teams that have since been established and grown significantly during this time, including the Office of Responsible AI and a responsible AI team, known as RAIL, that is embedded in the engineering team responsible for our Azure OpenAI Service.”
Less than 10 team members were impacted by layoffs on the ethics and society team, and some of the former members now hold key positions within the company’s Office of Responsible AI and the RAIL team, the spokesperson said.
