Holding hands with Meta, Microsoft's stock price reaches a historic high: AI office assistants start charging fees in the United States | Microsoft | Office
After the official launch of the paid AI subscription service, the share price of Microsoft, an American Internet giant, hit a record high.
On July 18th local time, Microsoft officially announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence subscription service at the Microsoft Global Partners Annual Conference. For the artificial intelligence assistant Microsoft 365 Copilot, subscription merchants of Office 365 E3, E5, Business Standard Edition, and Business Advanced Edition will be charged a monthly fee of $30 per person.
According to Consumer News and Business Channel in the United States, with the addition of Copilot subscriptions, the monthly price paid by corporate customers for Microsoft 365 may increase by more than 50%, or even up to 83%.
Affected by this news, Microsoft's stock price rose nearly 4% to close at $359.49 per share, with a market value of $2.67 trillion, setting a new historical high.
Paid AI assistants may change the way "workers" work
Most companies cannot avoid Office software such as Word, Excel, PPT, etc., and Microsoft's AI assistant Copilot will change the way "workers" work globally.
According to Microsoft's official website, Microsoft 365 Copilot can provide creativity in Word, analyze data in Excel, design presentations in PPTs, categorize Outlook inbox, and create meeting minutes in Teams conferencing software.
It is worth noting that Microsoft 365 Copilot can infer all business data in an enterprise environment, including asking questions and obtaining answers from the network.
Microsoft has stated that unlike some generative artificial intelligence applications on the market that have a single function, such as real-time transcription and copywriting, Microsoft 365 Copilot is unique, with thousands of skills and the ability to reason and perform any task based on all content and context. Its data foundation is all user emails, calendars, chats, documents, etc.
Microsoft provides an example where Copilot can generate updates from morning meetings, emails, and chats and send them to the team. It can also track the development progress of last week's projects and create SWOT analysis based on internal files and network data.
Regarding data security, Microsoft emphasizes that Microsoft 365 Copilot is based on achievable enterprise level security, privacy, identity, and compliance policies. Enterprise data will be logically isolated and protected, and will always be within the control of the enterprise.
Microsoft introduced that Copilot is currently in the early testing stage, and starting from May this year, 600 enterprise customers have been invited to participate in the experience program. However, Microsoft has not yet announced a timetable for its public launch.
In addition to the "productivity change" feature mentioned above by Microsoft, Copilot also has all the features of the artificial intelligence chat tool - Bing Chat Enterprise.
Bing Chat Enterprise is a chat tool for enterprises that provides AI supported chat functions within the enterprise. Chat data is not saved, monitored and accessed by Microsoft, and the data is not used to train models.
Currently, BingChatEnterprise are included for free in Microsoft365E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium editions. Microsoft said that in the future, it will separate the chat function as a fee-based product, which costs $5 per user per month.
The US Consumer News and Business Channel believes that the launch of these new tools means that technology giants such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM are intensifying their competition in the field of generative artificial intelligence tools.
Microsoft's "hack" OpenAI, partnering with Meta
The collaboration between Meta and Microsoft is also another highlight of Microsoft's annual global partnership conference.
Microsoft stated that the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform and Windows system will support a large language model called Llama 2 under Facebook's parent company Meta. Meta stated in a press release that Microsoft is the "preferred partner" for its Llama 2 software.
Llama 2 is an open-source big language model similar to ChatGPT. Compared to the first generation Llama, one of the biggest highlights of Llama 2 is its ability to be commercialized, allowing any organization or individual developer to use it for commercial purposes, such as developing generative artificial intelligence assistants, chatbots, etc.
Microsoft stated that integrating the Llama 2 language model into Windows will make it the best development platform for building a "personalized" generative artificial intelligence experience.
This transaction is of great significance to Microsoft as it indicates that the technology giant is strongly supporting artificial intelligence language models developed without OpenAI. Previously, Microsoft had invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and reached partnerships in multiple fields. According to foreign media interpretation, the strong collaboration between Microsoft and Meta, two major technology giants, may change the development pattern of generative artificial intelligence.