Two days later on another stage, in another venue, at another developers' conference, Nadella made his second unannounced appearance of the week--this time at GitHub Universe. There Thomas Dohmke, GitHub's CEO, was showing off a new version of the company's AI programming tool, Copilot, that can generate computer code from natural language. Nadella was effusive: "I can code again!" he exclaimed. Today, Nadella will be onstage speaking to developers at Microsoft Ignite, where the company is announcing even more AI-based developer tools, including an Azure AI Studio that will let devs choose between model catalogs from not only Microsoft, but also the likes of Meta, OpenAI, and Hugging Face, as well as new tools for customizing Copilot for Microsoft 365. If it seems like Nadella is obsessed with developers, you're not wrong.

March 6 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp on Monday bundled the technology behind ChatGPT with its Power Platform that allows users to develop applications with little or no coding, the latest integration of artificial intelligence into its products. Big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Baidu Inc are speeding up the integration of generative AI - technology that has gained popularity for its ability to generate human-like text responses to queries - into their offerings. Microsoft said a line of business-intelligence and app-development tools within Power Platform, including Power Virtual Agent and AI Builder, was updated with the new capabilities. Power Virtual Agent, a tool for businesses to build chatbots, can now connect to internal company resources to generate summaries of weekly reports and customer queries. Microsoft has also added generative AI capabilities to AI Builder, which lets businesses automate workflows, and Dynamics 365, a business management platform.

Hardware maker Nvidia is ramping up its efforts to make a stand in the Metaverse. On Tuesday, the company revealed a new set of developer tools focused on metaverse environments, including new AI capabilities, simulations, and other creative assets. Creators utilizing the Omniverse Kit, along with apps such as Nucleus, Audio2Face and Machinima, will be able to access the new upgrades. Nvidia says one primary function of the tools will be to help enhance building "accurate digital twins and realistic avatars." Quality of metaverse interaction is a hot topic in the industry, as developers and users ponder the quality of experiences over the quantity.

Microsoft will release a refreshed Arm-based desktop PC for developers later this year. Project Volterra will speed up machine learning algorithms for data scientists and AI developers. The vendor introduced the stackable PC, which can connect to multiple units for additional capabilities, last week at Microsoft Build, its annual software and web developer conference. The PC will enable developers to use Arm-native versions of Microsoft developer tools to build apps. The small PCs, which look like Mac minis, are built from recycled ocean plastic. They are the first to integrate the gasconaded neural processing units (NPUs) -- a controversial name that some analysts view with skepticism.

Use this central platform to reliably track all your organization's machine learning models, from experimentation to production. Centrally manage access controls and artifact audit logs, with a complete model history that enables traceable model results.

They can be too opaque, and to raise the signal of what is most important, they end up hiding too much. "The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise."--

At the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services (AWS) added a bevy of tools to its portfolio intended to accelerate the pace of application development while simultaneously simplifying DevOps processes. AWS development tools unveiled this week include AWS Amplify Studio, a visual development environment that allows developers to create web application user interfaces (UIs) with minimal coding. Ken Exner, head of product for developer tools at AWS, said as an extension of an existing AWS Amplify Studio tool, this latest addition allows developers to customize application UIs at a higher level of abstraction using a library of components while enabling them to drop down to a lower level of coding to customize their application further whenever required. After the UI is designed, AWS Amplify Studio automatically generates the associated JavaScript or TypeScript code for the developer. In general, AWS is committed to improving developer productivity by providing, for example, automated reasoning tools that automate processes without locking devs into a layer of abstraction that, ultimately, may create a wall that blocks them from meeting customization requirements, he said.

Explosion, a company that has combined an open source machine learning library with a set of commercial developer tools, announced a $6 million Series A today on a $120 million valuation. The round was led by SignalFire, and the company reported that today's investment represents 5% of its value. Oana Olteanu from SignalFire will be joining the board under the terms of the deal, which includes warrants of $12 million in additional investment at the same price. "Fundamentally, Explosion is a software company and we build developer tools for AI and machine learning and natural language processing. So our goal is to make developers more productive and more focused on their natural language processing, so basically understanding large volumes of text, and training machine learning models to help with that and automate some processes," company co-founder and CEO Ines Montani told me. The company started in 2016 when Montani met her co-founder, Matthew Honnibal in Berlin where he was working on the spaCy open source machine learning library.

Amazon Alexa is one of today's go-to voice assistants. Available on hundreds of devices, from smart speakers to displays and thermostats, Alexa grows more popular every day, with over 100 million device owners and 900,000 registered developers producing Alexa-powered products. Speaking of the latter, Alexa Live 2021 has finally arrived. This year's free virtual symposium is a great place to learn about all of the new developer tools and services that Alexa will be capable of in the near future. Here's everything announced at this year's event.

I was fortunate enough to be given early access to GitHub's new "AI pair programmer," Copilot, which generates quite a stir. My early ideas and experiences with this tool are shared in this blog post. It's made me shout "wow" a couple of times in the last few hours, which isn't something you'd expect from your developer tools! However, there are some real-world limits to this tool right now, which I'll go through in this article. In summary: Copilot appears out of nowhere, interrupting my flow.