Microsoft Build 2024 unveils advanced AI tools for developers

The landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) development is experiencing a seismic shift as concepts transition into practical applications, revolutionising the industry. The Microsoft Build 2024 conference showcased the company's commitment to empowering developers with enhanced AI tools and platforms, signalling a new era of efficiency and capability in software development.

Key highlights from the event focused on bolstering developers' ability to create transformative AI experiences with increased speed and resourcefulness. Microsoft reiterated its dedication to providing an expansive and simplified access to AI and data application platform services, ensuring that developers can concentrate on building applications with built-in responsibility, safety, security, and reliability features.

Microsoft's Azure AI services are central to this evolution, with more than 50,000 companies globally, including Mercedes-Benz, Unity, Vodafone, H&R Block, PwC, and SWECO, leveraging the platform for substantial business impact. The general availability of Azure AI Studio, a critical component of the copilot stack, underscores Microsoft's commitment to responsible generative AI development. The platform's user-friendly interface and code-first capabilities, such as Azure Developer CLI (AZD) and AI Toolkit for VS Code, support diverse development workflows.

Azure AI Studio facilitates the exploration of AI tools, orchestration of multiple interoperable APIs and models, grounding using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques, performance testing, and scalable deployment with continuous monitoring. The comprehensive model catalogue, hosting over 1,600 models, offers developers a robust selection of large and small language models, enhancing flexibility and benchmarking for business-specific needs.

The announcement of OpenAI's latest flagship model, GPT-4o, available in Azure OpenAI Service, marks a significant advancement in multimodal AI, integrating text, image, and audio processing. Additionally, models such as Phi-3-small, Phi-3-medium, and Phi-3-vision from Microsoft's Phi-3 family are tailored for resource-constrained environments, including on-device and edge scenarios, providing fast response times.

Enhancements to Azure AI Speech and Azure AI Search, including Speech analytics and Video translation, as well as increased storage and vector index capacities, were also announced, aiming to elevate AI app performance and scale. Moreover, developers can now seamlessly access Azure services within familiar tools like VS Code and GitHub, with the introduction of GitHub Copilot for Azure and AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

New features such as .NET Aspire and Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) Automatic are set to simplify cloud-native development by automating configurations and integrating resilient patterns. These tools allow developers to focus more on coding and less on setup, promoting faster and more reliable app development.

In the realm of data solutions, Microsoft unveiled new AI-enhanced features in Azure databases, including native vector search capabilities in Azure Cosmos DB and AI extensions for Azure Database for PostgreSQL. These advancements aim to streamline the integration of AI models with database operations, providing real-time, low-latency embedding generation and natural language interaction with data through Copilot capabilities.

Safety and responsible AI usage remain pivotal, with updates to Azure AI Content Safety, including custom content filters, prompt shields, and groundedness detection. Microsoft Defender for Cloud extends its protection to AI applications, integrating with Azure AI Content Safety to monitor and mitigate threats.

Facial Liveness, a feature of the Azure AI Vision Face API, is now available in preview for web applications, enhancing multi-factor authentication by preventing spoofing attacks. This underscores Microsoft's commitment to secure and responsible AI deployment, supplemented by comprehensive security and compliance controls through Microsoft Purview, the company states.