Microsoft is teaching AI to write apps for users

Microsoft is using the power of GPT-3's natural language artificial intelligence (AI) to help people who don't know how to code write their own software using Microsoft's PowerApps development platform, unveiled at Microsoft's Build developer conference. Redmond has hoped that PowerApps would become a powerful corollary to its Office suite, but the platform has languished a bit. Microsoft originally set up PowerApps in 2015 around a set of programming templates, pulling data from user-defined sources and then outputting results. Think of it like the next level of a traditional macro in Microsoft Office--it's a way for an average user to write a program to instruct Windows to perform a task, but with minimal or no knowledge of program coding. The problem is that even what Microsoft calls a "low code" or "no code" approach can be time-consuming and complex.