Releases

Microsoft introduces Azure OpenAI Service, providing managed access to OpenAI models through Azure's enterprise cloud controls.

GitHub launches Copilot in technical preview as an AI pair programmer that suggests code inside the editor.

Microsoft agrees to acquire Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion including net debt, expanding its healthcare and conversational-AI capabilities.

Microsoft spins Xiaoice into an independent company while retaining an investment interest.

Microsoft Research introduces DeBERTa, improving Transformer language models with disentangled attention and enhanced mask decoding.

Microsoft open-sources DeepSpeed with the ZeRO optimizer to reduce the compute and memory cost of large-model training.

Microsoft introduces Turing-NLG, a 17-billion-parameter generative language model and, at the time, the largest published language model.

Microsoft organizes Project Turing to develop large language models shared across Bing, Office, Dynamics and Azure.

Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI and becomes its exclusive cloud partner for new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.

Microsoft open-sources InterpretML for training interpretable models and explaining black-box predictions.

Microsoft open-sources ONNX Runtime as a cross-platform high-performance inference engine.

Microsoft agrees to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock, bringing the developer platform that later launched GitHub Copilot into Microsoft.

Microsoft acquires conversational-AI startup Semantic Machines to advance more natural, context-aware dialogue systems.

Microsoft releases the first public preview of ML.NET, bringing cross-platform machine learning to .NET developers.

Microsoft researchers introduce Fairlearn to assess and mitigate unfairness in machine-learning systems.

Microsoft and Facebook introduce the Open Neural Network Exchange format to improve model interoperability across AI frameworks.

Microsoft introduces Project Brainwave, an FPGA-based architecture for real-time deep-learning inference in cloud and edge systems.

Microsoft launches Seeing AI, an accessibility application that narrates people, text, products and surroundings for blind and low-vision users.

Microsoft creates the AI and Research Group, combining research, information-platform and AI product teams under Harry Shum.

Microsoft launches Cognitive Services APIs for adding vision, speech, language, knowledge and search capabilities to applications.

Microsoft takes the Tay social chatbot offline after coordinated abuse caused it to produce offensive content, prompting a public review of safeguards and social-AI deployment.

Microsoft releases its Computational Network Toolkit under an open-source license for deep neural-network training.

Microsoft makes Azure Machine Learning generally available as a cloud platform for creating and deploying predictive models.

Microsoft launches Xiaoice, a social conversational AI designed for long-term, emotionally engaging interactions.

Microsoft introduces Cortana as a personal digital assistant for Windows Phone, later expanding it across Windows and Microsoft 365.