10 things to know from Microsoft Ignite 2023: Bing Chat rebrand, custom AI chips, more

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Microsoft Ignite 2023 is the annual conference by the company focused on developers and IT professionals where the company hosts sessions for its developer community to come and experience the new technology Microsoft is working on. The two-day conference kick-started with a keynote session yesterday, November 15, where the company typically made several software and hardware announcements that are relevant for developers as well as consumers. This year, Microsoft has planned nearly 600 sessions for the developers to attend physically in Seattle or online (for registered users). It also made some big announcements including plans to manufacture its own AI chips, rebranding of its Bing Chat to Copilot, and new capabilities for its Microsoft 365 suite of Copilots. Let us take a look at the 10 biggest announcements from the evening.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) compiling the highlights from the event as well. Posting a short video, he said, “Copilot will be the new UI for both the world's knowledge and your organization's knowledge, but most importantly, it will be your agent that helps you act on that knowledge. Here are highlights from my keynote today at #MSIgnite”.

1. Bing Chat gets rebranded to Copilot: Less than a year after launching its own ChatGPT-like chatbot and integrating it with the Bing search engine (and later in Microsoft Edge and Windows 11), the company is now rebranding the product. Going forward, it will be known as just Copilot. This move is being seen as Microsoft giving up on the search engine race with Google, and instead focusing on the chatbot race, competing directly with OpenAI. This also brings some cohesion in the naming logic for all of the