It's been an eventful weekend at OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco. In a surprise move Friday, the company's board of directors fired co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, which set off an institutional crisis that has seen senior staff resign in protest with nearly 700 rank-and-file employees threatening to do the same. Now the board is facing calls for its own resignation, even after Microsoft had already swooped in to hire Altman's cohort away for its own AI projects. Here's everything you need to know about the situation to hold your own at Thanksgiving on Thursday. This saga began forever ago by internet standards, or last Thursday in the common parlance.

Did you miss a session from MetaBeat 2022? Head over to the on-demand library for all of our featured sessions here. Today Microsoft Azure announced a variety of enhancements across its AI services at Ignite 2022. The company says the updates will help people "work smarter, not harder by bringing more intelligence, insights and value to the hands of customers." The product updates include new innovations in Azure Applied AI Services to help customers automate mundane tasks and serve end-users in multiple languages worldwide; updates to Azure Cognitive Services to "enrich and simplify" the creation of AI apps with pre-built models and text-to-image generation; and new capabilities in Azure Machine Learning that boost the productivity of developers and data scientists of all skill levels, and help further responsible AI deployment.

The Microsoft Power Platform has become an industry leading low-code development platform that enables developers of all skill levels to create unique solutions for business challenges. Infusing AI into solutions can improve processes in many ways, including efficiency, accuracy, and ease of use. As an example, we previously did a demonstration on how AI Builder works seamlessly with Power Automate to create a fully automated document processing solution. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced some exciting new capabilities we are releasing for AI Builder. These new features will further enable Power Platform developers to utilize AI for their business solutions.

This year at Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing a set of new capabilities across Power Platform that enable business users (Citizen Developers), business analysts, IT admins, and professional developers to build and deliver applications faster and more cost-effectively. Be sure to watch our featured sessions--What's next for the Microsoft Power Platform and Driving a Data Culture with Power BI for a deep dive into these capabilities, as well the news story and featured session for Dynamics 365 for a comprehensive view of innovation across Microsoft Business Applications that can drive innovation and customer excellence across the organization. Since first introducing RPA in Microsoft Power Automate at Ignite in 2019, hundreds of thousands of organizations have adopted Power Automate and are now automating billions of actions each month. In 2020, we introduced Power Automate Desktop, which extended automation capabilities in Power Automate to on-premises processes and local desktop tasks. Today, we are continuing this momentum by announcing that Power Automate Desktop, which offers RPA capabilities that easily automate time-consuming manual work, will be available to Windows 10 users at no additional cost.

Demonstration of the latest Power BI capabilities to help you to discover and explore insights in your data including: Automated Machine Learning for predictive modelling. This is Power BI's role as part of the Power Platform helping you to prepare your data across sources. At Microsoft Ignite 2019, this was session THR2285: Microsoft Power BI and the Power Platform: Dataflows, AI, and new visualizations. Justyna Lucznik is a Program Manager for the AI features of Power BI. She has worked on AI visualizations like the decomposition tree and key influencers.

While Build may certainly be the Microsoft conference to pay attention to when it comes to developer-centric announcements, this week's Ignite conference had news aplenty as well. As you might expect, AI and Quantum computing took center stage in terms of developer-related news, according to one article in Visual Studio Magazine. "While the show largely targets IT pros and users, it also features plenty of developer-related content, which this year is highlighted by cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing announcements," they write. Included in these were new features for Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Bot Service, a new Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise, and an upcoming update to that Quantum Development Kit. But really, this piece does a fine job summarizing these buzzworthy announcements, so we figured we'd plow ahead and take a look at several developer-related updates that were far less flashy but may have equal impact on your day-to-day. I'm in a committed relationship https://t.co/OcfVZbTVvJ

Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft's annual developer conference, wrapped up last week and many of the big announcements focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The keynote presentation from Microsoft's Cloud AI lead Eric Boyd showcases the major developments, or you can check out his accompanying blog post for a written summary. In this post, I'll dive down into the details of the specific announcements and provide links to the associated recorded presentations from Ignite and other technical documents. Azure Machine Learning Service (Azure ML) adds several new capabilities. These include a new Python package that developers can use to prepare data for analysis, automate machine learning and deep learning model training, track model performance under various conditions, and automate the model selection process (see below).

"Data wrangling" was an interesting phrase to hear in the machine learning (ML) presentations at Microsoft Ignite. Interesting because data wrangling is from business intelligence (BI), not from artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft understands ML incorporates concepts from both disciplines. Further discussions point to another key point: Microsoft understands that business-to-business (B2B) is just as fertile for ML as business-to-consumer (B2C). ML applications with the most press are voice, augmented reality and autonomous vehicles.

Microsoft has put artificial intelligence (AI) at the center of Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, Florida, with CEO Satya Nadella declaring that "a little bit of machine learning here and there" is not enough. Microsoft signaled a shift in focus last month, tweaking the "mobile-first and cloud-first world" mantra that Nadella has pushed since he was appointed in 2014. In an annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft abandoned the phrase and stated a new strategic vision, saying: "Our strategic vision is to compete and grow by building best-in-class platforms and productivity services for an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge infused with AI". Nadella (pictured) confirmed this new approach at Microsoft Ignite, saying that AI needs to become a more integral element of IT. "It's no longer about deploying one AI system or doing a little bit of machine learning here and there," he said. "It is about, in fact, changing the culture inside our organizations so that we understand very deeply what it means to create these digital feedback loops across all these outcomes. "These new virtuous cycles between our products, their usage, their creation of data and the business model, that's what we've got to get intuitively.

Microsoft is placing its bets on Artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud. At Ignite 2017 in Orlando, Redmond emphasized on how AI has become the key ingredient of everything it's developing. Azure Stack, the hybrid cloud offering is available to enterprise customers through select OEM partners. When Microsoft gets serious about an emerging technology, it starts with the developers. Microsoft is following the same path for making AI accessible.