Microsoft changes keyboard after 30 years to encourage AI – 01/04/2024 – Tech

Microsoft will add a shortcut key to call an artificial intelligence assistant in Windows, in the first keyboard change on its computers in 30 years. The company announced the news in an announcement this Thursday (4).

The shortcut will function as the start key, which shows a list of programs available on the computer. He will, however, call Microsoft’s copilot, an assistant that uses the same ChatGPT technology to interact with the user.

Since making an investment of US$10 billion (around R$49 billion) in the creator of ChatGPT (OpenAI), the Windows developer has gained priority access to OpenAI’s generating artificial intelligence solutions. Thus, it started to integrate technology-based resources into its products, which started with the Bing search engine.

Microsoft has developed virtual assistants, which it calls copilots, for Word, Excel, Outlook, the GitHub programming platform and Windows itself.

The new button will be marked by the Windows copilot symbol and will be to the right of the “Alt Gr” key. In promotional material, Microsoft says that it will be possible to use it to create images, write emails, organize plans and request summaries on a given subject.

A Microsoft partner, OpenAI is at the forefront of developing generative artificial intelligence, capable of generating texts, images and audio. The main competitor in the area, Google announced that it had developed a more powerful AI model than those available to the public, but has not yet launched it or presented a date for it.

In projections for 2024, the team at the specialized newspaper Financial Times cited the chance of Microsoft overtaking Apple as the most valuable company in the world, due to the momentum it gained with the artificial intelligence market.

The Windows developer’s next balance sheets will show whether there are possibilities for revenue in the short term with the new services.

The new key will be the technology giant’s main announcement during the Consumer Electronics Show, the world’s main electronics fair, scheduled to take place between January 9th and 12th in Las Vegas. There, the first computers with the new feature will be seen. The Windows developer is working to convince computer manufacturers to adopt the new keyboard.

In the early afternoon of this Thursday (4), Microsoft’s shares were up 0.36%, and the company’s market value was US$2.76 trillion. At the same time, Apple’s shares were falling and totaled US$ 2.83 trillion — 2.5% more than the Windows developer.

The enthusiasm of the technology sector with AI still makes Microsoft profit on another front: cloud services. Microsoft’s Azure platform, equipped with supercomputers, serves as a base for companies and startups to train their large language models, such as ChatGPT.

OpenAI, for example, reversed a large part of the US$10 billion it received from investment in computational processing services from Microsoft. Other of the most innovative companies in the artificial intelligence race have done the same, such as Inflection.AI and Cohere.