Microsoft
- Founded: April 4, 1975
- Founders: Bill Gates, Paul Allen
- Headquarters: One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, U.S.
- Website: microsoft.com
Microsoft, journey in artificial intelligence represents one of the most comprehensive examples of how a major tech company has evolved in this field. From the founding of Microsoft Research in 1991 to recent developments like Copilot, the company has gradually transformed its approach: from pure research to integrating AI into virtually all its products and services. This timeline shows not only the technical development but also how Microsoft has strategically pivoted toward AI as a central element of its business future, culminating in its current position as one of the world leaders in applied artificial intelligence technologies.
1991 Microsoft Research
Microsoft founds Microsoft Research, its research division dedicated to exploring advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence.
2009 Bing
A search engine that integrated AI to offer more precise and relevant results.
2014 Cortana
A virtual assistant for Windows 10 that used AI to perform tasks such as scheduling appointments, setting reminders, and answering questions.
2015 Microsoft Azure Machine Learning
Microsoft launches Azure Machine Learning, a cloud-based machine learning platform designed to develop and deploy AI models.
2016 Cognitive Services
Microsoft introduces Cognitive Services, a collection of APIs that allows developers to integrate intelligent capabilities such as vision, language, and knowledge into their applications.
2017 Microsoft Translator (Neural Machine Translation)
Microsoft enhances its translation service with Neural Machine Translation, using neural networks to provide more accurate and natural translations.
2018 OpenAI Partnership
Microsoft establishes a partnership with OpenAI to advance AI research and development. In 2020, Microsoft becomes the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI.
2019 Azure AI
Microsoft unifies its AI services under the Azure AI brand, offering tools and services including Azure Machine Learning, Cognitive Services, and Bot Services.
2019 Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG)
Microsoft presents T-NLG, one of the largest and most advanced language models of its time, designed to generate text and understand natural language.
2020 Turing Natural Language Representation (T-NLR)
Microsoft develops T-NLR, a language model focused on natural language understanding tasks.
2020 DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention)
Microsoft introduces DeBERTa, an improvement on the BERT model that uses disentangled attention and an enhanced decoder to improve language understanding.
2021 Microsoft Mesh
Microsoft launches Mesh, a mixed reality platform that enables collaborative and holographic experiences, integrating AI technologies to enhance interaction and productivity.
2023 GPT-4 Partnership with OpenAI
Microsoft, as OpenAI's exclusive cloud partner, facilitates the use of GPT-4 through its Azure services, integrating it into products such as Azure OpenAI Service.
2023 Copilot
Previously known as Bing Chat Enterprise, launched in 2021, offers chat with text, voice, and image functions, document and web page summarization, image creation, web foundations, plugins, and GPT. It's available on the web, mobile apps, and throughout the Microsoft 365 environment.
