Microsoft debuts new AI features, programs at Build 2023 Conference

Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley breaks down the latest news from Microsoft’s Build 2023 Conference, the company’s new AI features with Bing and ChatGPT, Azure AI Studio, and Windows Copilot, and Apple’s multi-billion dollar deal with Broadcom.

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RACHELLE AKUFFO: Well, Microsoft's yearly developer conference Build is kicking off today. Developers, engineers, and technology professionals will hear about the company's latest innovations. And a particularly exciting area that investors and professionals will be listening to is how Microsoft is expanding its AI technology. Here with us now is Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley to give us more details, more AI. You've got to love it

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, that's right, Rachelle. There's a ton of AI news coming out of Microsoft's Build conference. There's three big announcements that I want to focus on. The first is we talk about Microsoft's Bing search engine. They have their Bing chat, that's powered by some of the technology that OpenAI has with ChatGPT.

But now, ChatGPT is actually getting Microsoft's Bing search engine built in. So what that means is anytime you fire up ChatGPT, you're going to be able to do a kind of more timely search. So it may not be just this second, but it's going to be more timely than you otherwise would get out of ChatGPT because that's trained on older data.

So the reason why this is important is it's not just good for ChatGPT users, but it also means that Bing is in front of more eyes. And the thing that Microsoft is chasing here is search engine market share. And they've said in the past that 1% of market share is worth potentially $2 billion in revenue for Microsoft.

So if they're able to get the search engine in front of more people via this ChatGPT extension, then that'll be something that's worthwhile. And it'll be available to users of ChatGPT Plus. That's the paid service. And then for free users, you just have to enable a plug-in. And we just saw ChatGPT launching on iOS and it's going to be coming to Android as well.

The other announcement that they have is something called Azure AI service. And this is basically Azure AI Studio. And this is basically a means for companies to develop their own chatbots or what Microsoft calls copilots.

Essentially, think of a company offering different health care options, and you need to find out which one allows you to purchase glasses. You'll be able to go into your company's portal. Type in which health care plan has glasses. And instead of reading through, you know, tons and tons of paperwork for no reason, you'll get that answer.

And so this is something that Microsoft says is going to be rolling out to enterprise customers. And those customers can then make that available to consumers or on the inside of things.

And then one of the other final announcements that we're seeing out of Microsoft is something called Windows Copilot. Now they're rolling out basically a chatbot for Windows itself. So you'd be able to click that Copilot app from the taskbar and then get direct access to that. You'll be able to ask it to do things like change settings in Windows. Summarize information that you may copy and paste directly into it. And set up plug-ins from third-party.

So really, we're seeing a huge slew of AI-related announcements, generative AI-related announcements from Microsoft today. And it just follows this pattern that they're on. Since February when they rolled out Bing and Edge, they've been continually hammering the fact that, look, we're pushing into generative AI. We have this OpenAI partnership.

We're coming for Google Search. Google's kind of trying to come back from that. And they have with their own I/O developer conference waiting in the wings. We have Meta, Apple, the rest of big tech also chasing generative AI. But for now, Microsoft is taking center stage.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: And we know that we're always waiting for what Apple will do. It's still reaping the benefits though, by having ChatGPT on the iOS app. So getting those fees from there. But also want to take a look with Apple, the multibillion deal with Broadcom. Tell us more about that.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, this is interesting. This is for 5G technologies that they're going to be offering. And, you know, we have Apple obviously leaning more into its own silicon. But here they're making this big deal with Broadcom. You have to wonder whether that's going to be included in the next iPhone or, I guess, we'll call it the iPhone 15, or whatever we're going to call it, or the subsequent version of the iPhone. We'll just call that the iPhone 16 for safety's sake.

You have to wonder whether or not they'll be showing up in those devices. But for now, obviously, a big win for Broadcom, at a time though, when the smartphone market is pulling back. We've talked about how Apple revenue has been down year over year. But they're expecting it to turn around towards the end of the year. That's when they release the newest phone and things could start to pick up again,

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Especially, if there are some real big changes with that new phone. We're always looking for the next and the biggest and the brightest. Thank you for getting us up to speed, our very own Dan Howley there for us.