The Six Five team discusses Microsoft Build 2024.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Microsoft Build. I mean, these Big Ten events, so many announcements. Copilot+ PCs. Listen, I have created new category products. I created one of the first internet PCs when I was at Compaq. I created one of the first sub-$1,000 PCs when I was a Compaq, it is fricking hard. Hats off to Qualcomm and Microsoft to do this.
First of all, you’ve got to make bets four years before this, particularly on the silicon side, but Roto-Rooting your operating system to get there. This is fricking hard. And then you have to align across all the OEMs, Dell, HP, Lenovo and more, and then across all the Taiwanese OEMs, and the Chinese, and then aligning across ISPs and global channels. This stuff is hard, and it is very impressive. It’s weird, the stuff on recall, how ignorant can people be reporting that recall is this privacy nightmare. It’s on-device, folks. It is taking those snapshots. Oh, and you can turn it off if you want. Give it a break, folks. It annoys me at the ignorance, and some of the folks who are essentially not doing their fact-checks, and just blowing up… And these are major outlets here. The other thing that I want to kick back on is, Daniel, I think you refer to this time, the trip that we took to Redmond to when generative AI started, and that was the Microsoft event-
Daniel Newman: It was the beginning kind of.
Patrick Moorhead: … with OpenAI.
Daniel Newman: Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: Boy, has Copilot been moving. Top to bottom, east to west, customized for your application, customized for different areas, and different personas.
Daniel Newman: Pat, they’re under it. They got it to the left, it’s to the right.
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly. Connecting the front-end to the backend. I mean, Copilot for finance, Copilot for… Copilot for pretty much any way you want to-
Daniel Newman: Daily service.
Patrick Moorhead: I know. No, it’s incredible. Out-of-the-box with Azure AI, 1,600 different foundation models on Azure AI, and not just OpenAI as some people mistakenly talk about. So a lot of stuff going on there, I think the book of news, again, was more like a dictionary of news, but those were the highlights for me.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, so you could go on and on, but the double, triple, quadruple-click is that, folks, the whole beauty of the AI Copilot+ PC and what it can do is, it can give you all of the power of that sort of large language model in the cloud, but it’s on your device. And so you said it, I want to say it again, because the reiteration here is, you don’t have to do it, and you don’t have to let your device, but by the way, people, will you just stop acting like you give a crap about security? I mean, look, you carry the world’s most capable-
Patrick Moorhead: Privacy.
Daniel Newman: Surveillance device in your pocket all day long, you don’t look at the settings, you don’t read your privacy, you don’t read your terms and conditions, and now you’re going to care about this. Come on, get over it. I was on CNBC, I was asked about the whole Scarlett Johansson thing, and the OpenAI… Look, OpenAI’s got some cracks in the armor, there’s some weird stuff going on there for sure, but the actual issues related to privacy, that shipped sailed a long time ago. Nobody cares, regulators don’t have a prayer of being able to keep up with it, and the-
Patrick Moorhead: Well, Dan though, Dan, this was a factual thing though.
Daniel Newman: No, I know. I know. But what I’m saying though is, the whole trendline though, Pat, of people pretending to give a crap about something that they never gave a crap about, and in this case, it’s not even accurate. So the point is, now you’re picking an unfactual idea that, on your device, it’s somehow sending this back to the cloud, which it’s not, and people are going to suddenly be outraged by it, when all day long they have a device that is connected to the cloud, sending out their data, and they do not care about it. So choose your outrage carefully, people, because this isn’t your thing.
And long and longer short here, Pat, is, all I mean is, look, we need these enterprises like Microsoft to build solutions that allow people to have AI on their device privately for their own use. By the way, this is what Dell is doing, we’ll talk about… This is what IBM is doing, and the enterprises as well, so that companies can partition between what needs to stay private in the enterprise, compliant, regulated, and have the right data lineage and provenance. At the same time, on the other end of this spectrum, sometimes to get the right experience, you do need your data to go out, it needs to be refreshed, it needs to be… And you have to be able to be smart enough to make that decision. Enterprises are going to build products to grow their companies. That’s my personal take, and we can debate that at some point if you don’t agree with me, not just you, Pat, everybody out there, I’m ready to fight, I don’t care. Let’s go, dukes up, I’m in. Okay. What else though, Pat? Go ahead, go ahead-
Patrick Moorhead: No, no, no, no, you tell me. I’ve already talked about Build.
Daniel Newman: Okay. Well, real quickly, I mean, look, there were other things besides the PC, which… The new Copilot+ PC. They did expand their partnerships outside of OpenAI, there were some bigger announcements with Hugging face. They did focus too, Pat, on some small language models, which is really a trendline this week, these smaller language models getting more narrow. Fi 3 was a big focus this week from Microsoft, and the idea of being able to use smaller models, that’s partially about on-device, but that’s partially going to also be about enterprises being able to do vertical and industry-specific things with models that are going to be more valuable, lower power usage, and more efficient for getting workloads done that are going to be business positive for companies. And that was a big part of the focus as well, help developers build models that are going to drive efficiency, productivity in business, and ideally, do it all as power efficiently as possible.
Kind of a sub-topic, Pat, because you and I both know the power and AI thing creates this really tough contention in terms of business strategies, but I think we’re working towards it, we’re seeing a lot of progress in AI. I’m going to move on from this one, but it was a very positive Build, I actually thought it was very positive. Some people thought it was a little bit too AI device and gimmicky in some of the things I read, I actually thought they hit the message really well this particular event, and I give kudos to Microsoft for this one.
Patrick Moorhead: And the only thing I wanted to wrap-up, I just want to be very black and white about this, you can turn off all recall capabilities, and it doesn’t transmit data. That’s the whole idea, folks, of on-device AI keeping your privacy the way that you want it, it does not transmit. While I’m sure in the future there might be an option for you to do that, to be able to save snapshots, to have a longer memory, you can turn that off too. So let’s move on.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
