During its Build developers conference this year, Microsoft announced its first features for a product fueled by GPT-3, the natural language model from OpenAI developed to assist users in building applications without any programming knowledge. GPT-3 will come into play through Microsoft Power Apps, the low code app development platform that a helps a wide range of folks from those with no programming experienced to those considered experienced developers. So far, this platform has aided in the development of apps for travel during COVID-19, review of nonprofit gift donation and decreasing the amount of overtime needed for wind turbine maintenance. For example, the AI-powered platform will allow users to search for e-commerce products with a query such as "Find products where the name starts with'kids,'" similar to SQL. An efficient GPT-3 model will then convert that query as a formula into the open source Power Platform language, Microsoft Power Fx. Microsoft claims that this new platform solution will greatly benefit enterprises by using its new managed endpoints capability to solve real-world business problems, backed by familiar components such as Microsoft Azure for operation and Azure Machine Learning as a power source.

In the era of digital transformation, more organizations across industries are looking to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance day-to-day operations. In recent weeks, a number of organizations have tapped AI to help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. These applications range from using AI systems to monitor social distancing and contact tracing to identifying potential treatments for COVID-19. Earlier today, Microsoft announced a series of updates to the Azure AI system to help with everything from enhanced healthcare data management to leveraging the latest voice-enabled technologies for enhanced customer engagement experiences. In partnership with the Allen Institute of AI and other research groups, Microsoft developed the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset.

The main pillar of the plan is focused on accelerating Mexico's digital transformation through democratizing the access to technology. The company announced plans to establish a new cloud datacenter region in Mexico to deliver its intelligent and trusted cloud services to serve Mexico's public entities, organizations and Mexican society, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. This datacenter region is an important part of Microsoft's $1.1 billion investment plan in Mexico over the next five years. The plan also includes a robust education and skilling program with different initiatives the first one being the creation of three laboratories and a virtual classroom, in collaboration with public universities to create an education platform for digital skills, to expand employability in future generations. The first initiative of the commitment to apply artificial intelligence to create societal impact is an investment in the project "Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Pelagic Sharks in the Mexican Pacific Ocean" (Shark ID), focused on the conservation of Mako shark species, driven by Mexico Azul, as part of the initiative AI for Earth, creating societal impact.

Facility to open in early 2020 and focus on accelerating digital transformation in the industry, and upskilling the workforce with AI. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates – Microsoft today announced that it will open an AI Centre of Excellence for Energy in the United Arab Emirates – a global first for the company – to empower organisations in the industry in accelerating digital transformation, equipping the workforce with AI skills, as well as collaborating on coalitions to address sustainability and safety challenges. The company revealed its plans at the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC) 2019, held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Abu Dhabi. Supported by partners that include ABB, Accenture, AVEVA, Baker Hughes, C3.ai, Emerson, Honeywell, Maana, Rockwell Automation, Schlumberger, and Sensia, the Microsoft AI Centre of Excellence is expected to open in early 2020. The centre will support organizations to accelerate their digital journeys and drive innovation through active engagements with leading technologies and industry partners, as well as equipping the workforce with necessary AI readiness towards closing the skills gaps and enhancing employability.

Microsoft has announced a new model of its Xbox One console, a digital-only version that will not be able to play discs and costs less than its siblings. The Xbox One S All-Digital Edition is functionally and visually identical to the existing Xbox One S console, apart from the absence of a disc drive. It's aimed at "digital natives", according to Microsoft's Jeff Gattis – primarily teens who grew up without the discs and cartridges that older games relied upon. It is out on 7 May, and will cost £199 in the UK and $249 in the US, significantly cheaper than the other Xbox One models. It will come with Minecraft, Forza Horizon 3 and Sea of Thieves pre-installed on it s1TB hard drive, and a discounted subscription to Xbox Game Pass, which offers a library of more than 100 games for a monthly fee.

Microsoft Corp. has announced a five-year, $40 million initiative aimed at harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to help children, protect refugees and displaced people, promote respect for human rights, and improve the effectiveness of disaster relief and recovery efforts. Announced at the company's annual IT event and in conjunction with the United Nations General Assembly meeting, the AI for Humanitarian Action is the third program of Microsoft's AI for Good initiative, which was launched in July 2017; the $25 million AI for Accessibility program and $50 million AI for Earth programs were announced this past May and December. Through the initiative, Microsoft will engage nongovernmental and humanitarian organizations in partnerships that leverage their expertise and the company's AI and data science know-how to develop new AI solutions that help forecast disasters and better target relief efforts; address the needs of children, including the provision of basic health services and the prevention of child trafficking; optimize the delivery of aid, supplies, and services to sixty-eight million displaced people, twenty-eight million of whom are refugees; and help monitor, detect, and prevent human rights abuses. Microsoft also announced the hiring of John Kahan as chief data analytics officer for the company's corporate, external, and legal affairs. In that role, Kahan will lead the company's efforts to promote the sustainable use of the planet's resources, improve opportunities for people with disabilities, protect human rights, strengthen humanitarian assistance, and increase the capacity of NGOs to respond to humanitarian disasters.

Microsoft recently shared some new innovations for developers within its Azure AI Platform. The updates are meant to help businesses and organizations augment their own ingenuity and digital transformation efforts through new features related to search and machine learning capabilities. Cognitive Search is a new capability within the Azure Portal that uses AI to understand content and then integrate that information into Azure Search. It supports built-in file readers like PDFs and Office documents, cognitive skills for OCR like handwritten or print text, entity recognition, key phrase extraction, language detection, image analysis, and even facial recognition. So essentially, Search can pull data from a variety of Azure sources and use real knowledge and cognitive skills to organize and store the data in an index that's optimized for intuitive exploration.

Today is the first day of Microsoft's Build 2018 developer conference, and the day one keynote focuses on things like AI and the intelligent edge. At the event, the company announced AI for Accessibility, a $25 million, five-year initiative that aims to give AI tools to developers for them to create accessible AI solutions for people with disabilities. Microsoft says that globally, one in 10 people with a disability has access to any kind of assistive technology, and artificial intelligence can be a game-changer. Led by Chief Accessibility Officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie, the program will offer grants to developers, universities, NGOs, and inventors to develop new AI-based solutions for those with disabilities. After the seed grants are given, Microsoft says that it will provide larger investments in the projects that show the most promise.

Today, Microsoft announced a series of artificial intelligence-driven features for its Bing search engine to make it more conversational and nuanced. The news, unveiled at an event in San Francisco, means that Bing will make better use of object recognition, so-called machine reading (for parsing text and extracting meaning), and other techniques tuned and improved using AI training methods. Search results will now show both multiple perspectives and multiple sources, culled from a list of pre-approved news sources, to show Bing users different sides of issues ranging from the benefits and downsides of kale to the pros and cons of contentious political issues. This builds on an earlier feature, announced back in September, in which Bing added fact checks to search results in an effort to cut down on misinformation, fake news, and other distorted stories from manipulative information sources. In a new partnership with social news site Reddit, Bing will also surface information from subreddits right in search results by using algorithms to read and analyze the user-generated text across Reddit's many communities. The integration includes AMA questions and answers populated within the search card for popular celebrities, AskReddit-sourced answers to broad service questions, and top threads for specific subreddits that will show up in search results just by searching the name of the community.

There are plenty of stories about artificial intelligence ending the world as we know it (see 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, certain Elon Musk tweets). There are fewer about how AI could save the world, but believers are out there. At a gathering Monday for the two-year anniversary of the Paris climate accord, Microsoft announced a $50 million investment in its AI for Earth project that it believes can be a "game-changer for our planet." Microsoft launched AI for Earth over the summer with an initial $2 million, hiring Lucas Joppa to run it as the company's chief environmental scientist--a role that, as far as Joppa knows, doesn't exist at any other technology company. Since the launch, the company has given out 35 grants to groups in 10 countries.