This week, Microsoft demonstrated Copilot technologies, which make managing Azure cloud services more accessible, and a tool that makes developing and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) apps on the Azure platform more efficient at its Ignite 2023 conference.
Additionally, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code application that streamlines the process of developing bespoke copilots and data integration plugins for the Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 tool that Microsoft had previously introduced.
By utilizing large language models (LLMs), Microsoft Copilot for Azure facilitates IT teams in creating, configuring, finding, and debugging Azure services using natural language. IT teams can also use it to formulate sophisticated instructions, pose queries, and reduce expenses.
Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Azure Core, Erin Chapple, told Ignite participants that Microsoft is already using Microsoft Copilot Azure and a few of its customers to manage Azure infrastructure.
Using Azure AI Studio, a framework for calling the AI models that Microsoft makes accessible on the Azure cloud, to build and deploy AI apps more quickly is Microsoft’s long-term strategy. Ultimately, the aim is to enable enterprises to develop their copilots using trained AI models.
While enterprises are still in the early stages of using AI models to develop apps, it is clear that best practices in data engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, and machine learning operations (MLOps) must come together. Microsoft argues that the framework that will allow IT firms to accomplish that is Azure AI Studio.
Though there are other IT infrastructure resource providers with the same goals, Microsoft is the most advanced in providing a framework for creating large-scale AI applications because of its investments in OpenAI and the acquisition of GitHub. To assist developers in writing code that uses generative AI to automatically propose an editable plan for building an application based on natural language descriptions typed into the GitHub Issues project management software, GitHub last week unveiled a preview of an extension of the Copilot tools it already offers. With just one click, Copilot Workspace can produce editable documents that developers can use to write code that they can later review visually. It is also possible for the Copilot Workspace platform or application developers to repair any faults they find automatically.
In the meantime, GitHub has expanded Copilot Chat’s functionality to help developers find problems in their code base more efficiently by using natural language.
Thanks to generative AI, Applications are being produced much faster, but code still needs to be vetted. A general-purpose large language model (LLM) trained by ingesting code of various quality levels from the internet serves as the foundation for Chat GPT. Consequently, the code produced by the platform may need to be more efficient and secure. Professional developers still choose to build their code in many circumstances.
Naturally, not all programming tasks require the same degree of coding proficiency. ChatGPT will frequently produce scripts, for example, that can be confidently reused throughout a DevOps workflow. Thanks to technologies like GitHub Copilot, plenty of mediocre people are suddenly creating better code, and soon, domain-specific LLMs will allow writing better code regularly based on verified code samples.
The next task will be how to handle larger code volumes. AI will undoubtedly be used to manage DevOps pipelines, but for now, at least, the rate at which AI is being used to write code is faster than DevOps teams can handle.
