Microsoft will introduce an AI coding agent and provide competing AI models from its own data center.
Microsoft (MSFT.O) announced a new artificial intelligence tool that can do software coding chores automatically on Monday. The company also announced that it will provide new AI models created by Elon Musk’s xAI, Meta Platforms (META.O), and European companies Mistral and Black Forest Labs located in its own data centers.
The revelations, which were presented during Microsoft’s annual Build software developer conference in Seattle, Washington, highlighted how the company’s relationship with OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT and which Microsoft has sponsored, is evolving. Last week, OpenAI revealed a directly competing product.
Microsoft has recently positioned itself as a more neutral participant in the AI arms race, demonstrating a reduced willingness to invest large sums of money to support OpenAI’s research goals and collaborating with a wider range of AI companies, all with the goal of increasing sales while controlling expenses.
According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the new products from xAI, Meta, and other companies will be backed by the same dependability assurances as Microsoft’s OpenAI models.
“That’s just a game-changer in terms of how you think about models and model provisioning,” Nadella said in his keynote speech to the conference. “It’s exciting for us as developers to be able to mix and match and use them all.”
The new GitHub Copilot feature from Microsoft is an AI tool called a “coding agent” that assists developers with coding chores. The agent is intended to accomplish far more than earlier versions of Microsoft’s AI coding tools, which could automatically produce small amounts of code depending on what a developer was currently doing.
After receiving a few instructions from a human, such as a description of a software bug and a plan for fixing it, the agent will begin working and notify the human to check its work after it has completed coding.
A preview of a comparable agent, Codex, was made public by OpenAI last week.
Microsoft presented a vision of a future where companies will create their own agents for a variety of internal activities during Monday’s Build conference. Azure Foundry, a service that enables companies to create their own agents using any AI model they like, is its main product in that field.
According to Asha Sharma, corporate vice president for product at Microsoft AI platforms, those agents will probably be constructed using a variety of AI models, she told Reuters.
In addition to Meta’s Llama models, French firm Mistral’s offerings, and German startup Black Forest Labs’ offerings, Microsoft announced on Monday that it would add xAI’s Grok 3 and Grok 3 small models to its cloud services, increasing the total number of models it provides to Azure clients to over 1,900.
Importantly, those models will operate in Microsoft’s own data centers, allowing the company to guarantee their availability in a time when popular models frequently experience disruptions when demand exceeds capacity. According to Sharma, Microsoft intends to shortly introduce additional well-liked models.
“One of the most important parts to be able to build an app and seamlessly use the most popular models is making sure your reserved capacity that you have with Azure OpenAI starts to work across the most popular models,” Sharma stated.
Additionally, Microsoft announced on Monday that it was developing a method for AI agents to have a digital identity within a company’s systems that is similar to that of human employees.
Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research, stated, “The idea of treating agents as digital employees is the kind of revolutionary change that will both open some impressive new capabilities but also raise concerns about the impact that AI is going to make in the workplace.”
