Short of putting it in neon lights above its Redmond HQ, Microsoft has made it very clear this month that the company is all in on artificial intelligence (AI). The company has been getting closer to long-term partner OpenAI, looking to integrate ChatGPT into Bing and Office. It now seems that Windows 12 will drive Microsoft's mainstreaming of AI with ChatGPT as a central part of the upcoming platform.
Of course, we are still very much in the lifecycle of Windows 11, which was launched back in October 2021. However, Windows 12 is not as far away as you may think. Microsoft began development on the next generation of the OS in March 2022 and possibly even showed elements of the platform at Ignite 2022 in October.
The company is developing the new generation OS under the codename “Next Valley”. Microsoft is reportedly turning to a three-year launch cycle for new Windows platforms. That means Windows 12 could be launched as soon as October 2024.
Either way, Microsoft is going to embed AI deep into the platform and make it a core characteristic on Windows and across apps. Earlier this month, the company's product chief, Panos Panay, confirmed the AI plan.
“AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows, quite literally. Like these large generative models, think language models, code gen models, image models; these models are so powerful, so delightful, so useful, personal. But they are also very compute intensive, and so we haven't been able to do this before. We have never seen these intense workloads at this scale before, and they're right here. It's gonna need an operating system that blurs the line between cloud and edge, and that's what we are doing right now.”
Ubiquitous AI
Panay's commitment was later echoed by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. He says that no only will AI provide a framework for Windows 12, it will become omnipresent across Microsoft services:
“Every product of Microsoft will have some of the same AI capabilities to completely transform the product,” Mr. Nadella said.
The seeds of Microsoft's plan are already being sewn. Whether it is bringing AI driven natural language translation to Skype, merging the capabilities of Bing with the ChatGPT chatbot, or integrating OpenAI's GPT AI engine into Office apps, Microsoft is turning to an AI future.
And it is OpenAI that is at the heart of Microsoft's plans. This month, the company invested billions of dollars into the AI developer, building on an ironclad and existing multi-billion-dollar partnership. So strong is the link between Microsoft and OpenAI that it is hard not to view OpenAI as simply a division of Microsoft.
Together, Microsoft and OpenAI will use artificial intelligence to reshape Microsoft's products for consumers and enterprises. And Chat GPT will be at the heart of Windows 12.
ChatGPT is an OpenAI project that is built on top of the GPT-3 autocomplete text generator, part of the GPT-3 AI API that was built in collaboration with Microsoft. A demo of the chatbot has been available from OpenAI here (login required) since November.
Tip of the day: If you need to Create, Delete or Resize Partitions, Windows has everything you thanks to the built-in Disk Management-tool.
