Microsoft is all-in on AI: Part 1

We’re here with the I think legendary Scott Guthrie, and his legendary red shirt…

I agree.

Fresh off a keynote, day two at Build. You’ve just finished your keynote. Very good. Curious - I mean, you’re so cool, calm and collected up there… I’m sure that’s from years of experience. Do you still get any nerves at all when you do these keynotes, because there’s thousands – is it thousands of people? I think it’s probably a few thousands, so that’s a lot of people listening to every word. Any nerves at all? Or is it just like old hat now?

I still get – I don’t necessarily get nerves about being on stage. I think the biggest thing that – one of the things that I like to try to do is live demos in my keynotes. And so with live demos, there’s always a little bit of – you know, I hope the network works, I hope…

…nothing goes wrong.

…nothing goes wrong, and… You know, it is live, and so sometimes people do click the wrong things, or accidentally close a window… So that’s the only part in the keynote where I sometimes hold my breath a little bit. And thankfully, today both the live demos –

Very smooth.

…were super-smooth, and all the speakers were awesome. So it’s fun. And you know, a little bit of adrenaline makes it fun. If it was no stress, then it might be a little boring.

You don’t want to be too comfortable up there. One thing I noticed about these keynotes is that it’s all very orchestrated. I would be nervous not having a clicker to just advance to the next slide… Someone’s in charge of that, so it’s a team work thing. But then you’re relying on somebody else to like transition at the right time, and you don’t want to talk too slow… Those are the things that make me nervous up there. I’m sure it’s always a concern for everybody.

Yeah, it’s only in the last year that I’ve given up my clicker. It’s always been comforting to have it in my hand. But when you have animated slides that show architecture, getting your [unintelligible 00:05:28.19] You know, sometimes I get so excited, and I’ll talk, and then I’ll forget to have clicked… And so really in the last early last year, I think, I’ve kind of done the trust fall, and I now have someone backstage that clicks Next on the slides for me. That does make it a little easier for me. It means I can kind of focus a little bit more on what I’m talking about.

It looks more polished, too. The execution looks a lot smoother, like as if it’s – like Jerod said, orchestrated. Just very smooth.

A well-oiled machine. Very impressive.

Yeah. Very polished. The question I think though, having been through - this is day two, is the word AI being mentioned pretty much every slide. Are you excited about keeping to say AI? Are you kind of tired of saying AI? What is your personal perspective on AI at this moment, of having to say it so much?

I like saying it. I think both because for a lot of developers it’s still somewhat new… And I think also for the world and the industry at large, we’re still fully comprehending all the use cases for how we can use AI. And I think it’s a bit like when the internet first came out, or mobile phones suddenly became connected, and the iPhone moment, where people are kind of still in that “Could we do this?” phase… And I think that’s sort of exciting, because it is very much a platform shift, and we’re still in the early innings of kind of even understanding the art of the possible. And then everyone’s trying to figure out how to make the possible happen.

Well, even thus far at least, it’s been more of skill stacking, where Azure is matured - and you’re obviously still advancing the platform; it’s the supercomputer for AI, for the world, as you say in your keynote… But all the discussion has been around integrations of AI; how to essentially give this superpower to all of Azure. All of Copilot. All of the agents that you can build yourself. Which I think is different than the last Builds we’ve been to. We’ve been to one Build before this, right here in this very city… And I think even then, it was around loving GitHub. I think the acquisition was still fresh the last one we were here. Was that 2018, 2019?

Something like that…

Something like that.

Ancient history.

Yeah, almost ancient history, basically. But now it’s about the integration of it. So you have to be excited, because that is what the next layer of functionality is on top of the supercomputer, is the AI that you can not only leverage yourself as a platform, but give those feature sets to others to leverage as well.

[00:08:01.12] Yeah, it’s been a great ride with GitHub. One of the things we talked about when we acquired GitHub was recognizing the responsibility we had, which is GitHub is a very loved developer tool; it is the home of open source…

You’re wearing the shirt, too. Your GitHub hoodie.

I’ve got my GitHub sweatshirt on. And we recognized when we acquired GitHub that there’s a lot of responsibility. It is open source, it is open platform, it needs to support multiple clouds… And I think we’ve tried to be good stewards, similar to what we’ve done with VS Code, and similar to what we’ve done with .NET, of recognizing that we’re going to maintain the openness, we’re going to maintain the open source, and we’re going to also do good integrations, both in terms of across our products, but have it be an open platform. Even this week we talked about the open ecosystem around plugins to GitHub Copilot. We’ve announced a whole bunch of integrations with I think 20 other platform companies and tools vendors, to make sure that we also just keep honoring that spirit of making sure that GitHub is truly open, and truly developer-first, in terms of the methodology.

For AI, one of the things that we showed today that I’m also excited about is how to use GitHub with AI. And obviously, some of that is for the developer with GitHub Copilot. But I think also, the new support for what we call Prompty, which is an open source library, that we’re embracing with our Azure AI platform, so that you could basically check in artifacts into your source code, which basically describes your prompt that integrates with a model that can be versioned, that can be source-controlled, that can be unit-tested, and is very developer-friendly. And that’s a change even from our last Build a year ago, where we showed very much using our Azure AI tools to do all the development, which were incredibly powerful… But for a developer, it’s like “How do I write code? How do I version-control? How do I do CI/CD?” And part of what we showed this year is “How do you still use those great Azure AI capabilities, but also how do you have a very developer-first, developer-focused experience?”, which ultimately has text files, source code… Again, source control integration, and CI/CD natively built-in.

Raw materials. Prompty - it’s a file format, right?

It’s a YAML-based file format, and basically it allows you to kind of instantiate a connection to AI, and to a language model. And if you use an LLM, typically you’re providing prompts to the LLM. I mean, you certainly can concatenate that as a giant string as developer. But the nice thing about the Prompty file is it is a –

It’s readable.

It’s readable. And again, you can check it into source control.

Yeah, exactly.

And you can write unit tests against it. So what we’re trying to do is kind of provide…

Primitives, or…

Primitives, exactly, in an open source way.

That’s awesome.

So it is an open source library, there’s nothing exclusive to us… But you’re seeing a sort of integrate GitHub with Prompty, with Visual Studio Code, and then making it work first-class with our Azure AI platform. But I think the combination is very powerful for developers, and very natural for developers.

Yeah. I mean, you guys are trailblazing, for sure. There’s so much to figure out here… And certainly, if Azure can figure it out really, really well, it makes Azure such an attractive platform for people to build on. You showed a lot of people that are using it, 30,000 companies I think was referenced that were like starting to do these things, to build their own Copilots and stuff… And then I was out in the lunch area during lunch, talking to a couple of people like “Hey, are you using this stuff?” and everybody says no. Because I just feel like there’s almost one percenters at this point of the trailblazers, the really, really bleeding edge people, and then the rest of us common devs are just like “No, I’m not doing anything.” What do you say to the 99% - I’m just making up that number - the people who haven’t adopted anything? There’s so many questions, so many potential pitfalls, you don’t know where to get started, etc. What do you say to those folks about how they can bridge that gap?

[00:12:25.12] I think one of the things that’s interesting about AI - and I think this is similar to kind of, again, going back to whether it’s the internet, or whether it’s kind of the iPhone revolution, is it has entered the zeitgeist of people. And so even though there’s lots of developers that haven’t built an AI application, I think it’d be hard to find a developer on the planet who hasn’t tried ChatGPT, who hasn’t tried some generative AI app. And increasingly, we’re seeing just millions of developers that are using GitHub Copilot as part of their day to day activities.

So I think generative AI is something that we’re all – most developers now are using in some way, shape, or form, or have certainly at least tried. And to your point, I think where we are is still in the early innings; it’s sort of 18 months since ChatGPT was unveiled… And so people are still trying to figure out “Okay, how do I actually pivot to be an AI-first app? How do I incorporate AI into my app?” And part of what we try to do with Build is not just talk about the science and the art of the possible, but actually from a practitioner perspective “Here’s how you do it.”

And the first demo, or one of the first demos in my keynote was showing how you build a customer-facing chat experience into an existing website, or it could be a mobile app. And things like our Copilot Studio are really designed so that you can actually safely and securely build your first app, integrate it into an existing app, and not have to be a data scientist, not have to understand groundedness.

You know, Copilot Studio isn’t going to be the tool for every scenario, but if you’re looking to kind of build 80% of solutions, or 90% of solutions, it’s probably good enough out of the box. And then what’s nice is it has that no clips extensibility, so that you can call any API. And that was sort of the second demo that we did, that was live in the Azure AI section, where we used Python, we used Prompty, we basically grounded a model, it could use vector databases etc. And I’d probably encourage people to start and build a simple app using Copilot studio, and then as a developer keep going. Hopefully, what we’re showing with each of the events that we’re doing, each conference, it is becoming easier and easier. And ultimately, I do think in the next two years, I think pretty much every organization on the planet is probably going to have a custom AI app that they built.

Yeah.

And again, similar to other platforms waves, like the web, or like smartphones… Everyone has one, and everyone has built an app for it. And I think that’s what makes being a developer so exciting, is there’s always these types of platform waves happening, and it’s an opportunity to keep learning new tools, and become even more valuable.

Ride the wave. How far into the Microsoft stack or the Copilot stack do you have to be in order to start dipping your toe in the water? If you’re just a Python dev, who maybe uses open source stuff generally… Do you have to be like all-in on Microsoft to try some of the stuff with you guys, or how does that work?

Not at all, really. I mean, if you look at the demos we showed in the keynote, it’s Python with VS Code. You could run it on a Mac, or on Linux, or on Windows, using GitHub. That was the core editing experience. And we did log into an Azure AI subscription, but it can be with any browser or any platform.