With Microsoft leveraging GPT-4 and integrating it throughout its Microsoft 365 suite, the company is now adding some of these capabilities to its industry clouds, including Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, with new AI offerings specifically designed for nonprofit organizations.

In response to data that shows donations to nonprofits are decreasing while they also report large job vacancy rates, Microsoft is introducing a new Fundraising performance dashboard that offers up to-date interactive views of campaign performance, donor conversation and other fundraising analytics built on Power BI’s data visualization platform.

In a LinkedIn post, Microsoft also says nonprofits can use Dynamics 365 Marketing to use plain language queries to segment donors, volunteers and other constituents to identify how donors prefer to be contacted and when they would typically donate. This can help streamline the generation of donor and volunteer marketing materials.

Microsoft is also bringing its Viva Sales AI Copilot into Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit’s Fundraising and Engagement too, giving nonprofits AI-based tools to help them automate communications and generate relevant communications, reminders and recommendations to stay connected and engaged with donors.

Microsoft is also integrating the AI-based capabilities of Teams Premium into Fundraising and Engagement to help nonprofits be more productive and make sure donors, constituents and staff have all necessary information.

To help nonprofits identify individuals most likely to donate, Microsoft is introducing a new AI-powered donor propensity model into Fundraising and Engagement that leverages an organizations data. Microsoft is working with a select group of nonprofits to test this model, with plans to make it available in the second half of the year.

Microsoft is also integrating with fundraising and finance software vendors to help streamline reconciliation and reporting, in addition to maintaining a long list of implementation, data migration and payment partners.

In addition, the company is building an AI-powered Humanitarian Data Insights Tool to help humanitarian organizations better plan and resources their aid operations. This will be available in late 2023.

Microsoft will also be launching new AI and cloud open-source tools and resources in the Innovation Hub GitHub repository for specific nonprofit challenges, the company says.

The post Microsoft to Bring New AI Capabilities to Nonprofit Cloud appeared first on My TechDecisions.

This company’s announcement comes after they unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot–a generative AI tool for Microsoft 365 productivity apps–in March and began testing it with 20 enterprise customers.

In addition, Microsoft is rolling out Semantic Index for Copilot, a new capability in Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 designed to give customers a map to their user and company data and help prepare them for AI. The company says this uses a conceptual understanding to determine a user’s intent and help them find what they need.

Along with the new Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access program and Semantic Index for Copilot, Microsoft is introducing new capabilities for its AI assistant, essentially bringing Copilot to every part of the Microsoft 365 suite.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program

The company’s main announcement was centered around the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program, which it calls an invitation-only, paid preview that will out to an initial wave of 600 customers worldwide.

According to Microsoft, the overwhelming feedback from the group of 20 enterprise testers of Copilot is that the tool has the potential to revolutionize work, with specific emphasis on its helpfulness in meetings and jump-starting creativity. Those customers include Goodyear, General motors, The Walsh Group, Avanade, Chevron, Dow and other large organizations.

Copilot expanded to the full Microsoft 365 suite

New Copilot features have been expanded to Whiteboard, Outlook, OneNote, Loop and Viva Learning. In addition, Microsoft is bringing Dall-E, OpenAI’s image generator, into PowerPoint to help users create custom images to support their content. This is in addition to Copilot capabilities in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and others. 

According to Microsoft, Copilot in Whiteboard is designed to make Microsoft Teams meetings more effective by using the tool to generate ideas, organize them into themes, create designs and summarize whiteboard content. It leverages Microsoft Designer to turn ideas into original images that complement and enhance text.

In Outlook, Microsoft is adding new Copilot capabilities designed to make it easier to write emails with coaching tips and suggestions of clarity and tone.

In OneNote, Copilot will work across a user’s notes, images and data to draft plans, generate ideas, create lists and organize information in engaging formats within the company’s existing commitments to enterprise data security and privacy.

Microsoft is also adding Copilot to Microsoft Loop to help teams stay in sync by summarizing all content on a Loop page.

Lastly, Copilot in Viva Learning will help users create a personalized learning journey, the company says.

Semantic Index for Copilot

According to Microsoft, Semantic Index for Copilot is a sophisticated map of user and company data that doesn’t just look for documents with specific words in the file name or body.

“Instead, it understands that ‘sales reports are produced by Kelly on the finance team and created in Excel.’ And it uses that conceptual understanding to determine your intent and help you find what you need,” writes Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Microsoft 365 and future of work, in a blog.

Semantic Index for Copilot will enhance enterprise search results for E3 and E5 customers, regardless of if they are using Copilot or not, the company says.

The post Microsoft Expands Access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Adds New Features appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Microsoft, which made the announcements during its Microsoft 365 Conference this week, says it wants to simplify the SharePoint experience for content authors with AI to cut down on manual steps and unleash “millions of site owners, news authors, page creators, and portal administrators to write, brand, publish and share content with ease.”

Bringing Copilot to SharePoint, other new features

To that end, Microsoft is expanding its Copilot system to include it in SharePoint to help users create and edit SharePoint sites and pages. Doing so gives users the combined power of large language models with their data in Microsoft Graph, along with the company’s existing enterprise data security and privacy controls.

According to Microsoft, Copilot in SharePoint takes existing documents or presentations and turns it into a page that uses the best web design visuals of SharePoint. It can also help rewrite key passages of text on the page and help users adjust the tone of the text.

“If you can describe the site or page, Copilot in SharePoint will begin to create it for you, and then work with you to edit and refine it,” the company says in a Tech Community blog on the new capabilities. “And all within our existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise.”

The company says its investments in SharePoint and AI focus on the “full-spectrum of solid web design,” which includes branding and theming, typography and fonts, grid and layout, video and imagery, and animations and motion.

For example, users can prompt Copilot to create an employee onboarding site for product managers based on a PowerPoint presentation, and the user can then continue prompting Copilot to make changes until it looks right.

The Copilot tool in SharePoint can also help turn existing content into SharePoint pages that leverages new design visuals that were also announced.

In addition to Copilot, Microsoft is introducing a new start page experience for SharePoint, the ability to create video pages from Stream, page coauthoring capabilities, new branding tools and many more new features.

Faster, updated OneDrive

Microsoft is also launching a “refreshed” OneDrive experience for work and school that spans file experiences across Microsoft 365, with the goal of helping users access their files quickly and be more productive.

According to Microsoft, the new OneDrive start experience infuses AI to help users work more efficiently with the ability to see recent and recommended files from the home screen or navigate to a view of files based on who shared them.

A new “For you” area uses AI-powered file recommendations to surface personalized files and bring users the most relevant and time-sensitive content to top of OneDrive. In addition to recent files, OneDrive will suggest content from meetings.

The new OneDrive experience also features other personalization changes designed to make navigation easier, such as colored folders.

The new OneDrive features will also be available in the Files app in Teams so users get a consistent experience.

IT and security administrative features

Microsoft is also rolling out new management and security features for OneDrive and SharePoint, including the general availability of SharePoint data access governance insights and restricted access control policy for SharePoint sites to help limit oversharing and restrict access to content.

Microsoft also announced the preview of SharePoint cross-tenant content migration for scenarios like mergers and acquisitions, enabling SharePoint admins to move sites across two tenants easily without impacting user experience.

Learn more about the new IT management and security features of SharePoint and OneDrive in this Tech Community blog.

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The post Microsoft Brings AI to SharePoint, Refreshes OneDrive appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to OpenAI, GPT-4 is the latest milestone in the company’s efforts in scaling up deep learning. The company calls GPT-4 a large multimodal model that accepts image and text inputs and emits text outputs.

GPT-4 can pass a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers, while the previous model GPT-3.5 typically scored around the bottom 10%, according to the company.

OpenAI says its researchers and developers have spent six months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from its adversarial testing program and ChatGPT, resulting in what the company calls its “best-ever results … on faculty, steerability and refusing to go outside of guardrails.”

The company is releasing GPT-4’s text input capability via ChatGPT and the API, but the image input capability will take some more time as OpenAI collaborates with a partner.

What GPT-4 can do

OpenAI admits that the distinction between GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 is subtle when casually conversing with the model, but the difference comes out as the complexity of the task increases, resulting in a more reliable, creative and nuanced AI assistant.

According to the company, GPT-4 also scored in the 90^th percentile for the Uniform Bar Exam, compared to ChatGPT’s 10^th percentile placement. In addition, GPT-4 scored in the 99^th percentile in the Biology Olympiad, compared to the 31^st percentile for ChatGPT.

In addition, GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content, and is 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5, the company says, based on internal evaluations.

GPT-4 can also accept a prompt of text and images, allowing users to specify any vision or language task. According to OpenAI, GPT-4 generates text outputs like natural language or code given inputs consisting of interspersed text and images. It can also be augmented with test-time techniques developed for text-only language models, such as few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting.

OpenAI gives an example of this capability in which GPT-4 is shown an image of someone plugging a Lightning Cable shaped like a VGA connector into an iPhone, with a text prompt asking GPT-4 to identify the humor.

The image shows a package for a “Lightning Cable” adapter with three panels.

Panel 1: A smartphone with a VGA connector (a large, blue, 15-pin connector typically used for computer monitors) plugged into its charging port.

Panel 2: The package for the “Lightning Cable” adapter with a picture of a VGA connector on it.

Panel 3: A close-up of the VGA connector with a small Lightning connector (used for charging iPhones and other Apple devices) at the end.

The humor in this image comes from the absurdity of plugging a large, outdated VGA connector into a small, modern smartphone charging port.

Safety improvements

OpenAI says other improvements include more control over tone and style and increased protections to make the chatbot safer. The company says it engaged over 50 experts in AI risks, cybersecurity, biorisk, trust, and safety and international security to test the model, and feedback from those experts was fed into mitigations and improvements for GPT-4.

This activity has helped to improve GPT-4’s ability to refuse dangerous requests, such as how to synthesize dangerous chemicals or create a bomb.

The result is a decrease in the model’s tendency to respond to requests for disallowed content by 82% compared to GPT-3.5. Further, GPT-4 also responds to sensitive requests in accordance with policies 29% more often.

For example, early versions of the model would answer a prompt about how to create a bomb, while the new model refuses such requests. In addition, the old model would refuse to answer a prompt about where to find cheap cigarettes, while the new model cautions the user about the harm cigarettes can cause before answering the prompt.

However, the company still warns users that language models still have their limitations.

“Great care should be taken when using language model outputs, particularly in high-stakes contexts, with the exact protocol (such as human review, grounding with additional context, or avoiding high-stakes uses altogether) matching the needs of a specific use-case,” the company says.

How to access GPT-4

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT Plus subscribers will get GPT-4 access on chat.open.ai.com with a usage cap, and the company will adjust the cap depending on demand and system performance. A new subscription plan for higher-volume GPT-users may be released.

However, users of the new Microsoft Bing chat function already have access to GPT-4, Microsoft says.

In a blog, Microsoft confirms that the new Bing and the generative AI chat feature is already running on GPT-4, which has been customized for search.

“As OpenAI makes updates to GPT-4 and beyond, Bing benefits from those improvements. Along with our own updates based on community feedback, you can be assured that you have the most comprehensive copilot features available,” writes Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer.

The post GPT-4, Already Leveraged by Bing, Is Smarter Than ChatGPT appeared first on My TechDecisions.