Microsoft’s latest AI product announcement sent its stock to a record high on Thursday.
The tech giant the stock hit $427.81 in intraday trading Thursday and ended at $425.22, according to Investor’s Business Daily. It last hit an all-time high on February 9 when its stock hit $420.82.
Microsoft said Wednesday that its Microsoft Copilot for Security tool, which launches globally on April 1, is the industry’s “first generative AI solution” for security and IT professionals ” and is trained on “large-scale data and threat intelligence,” including more than 78 of the trillions of security signals the company processes daily.
Security Analysts claimed to be 22% faster with Copilot for Securityand 7% said their work was more precise with the tool, according to an economic study by the company.
Vasu Jakkal, vice president of security, compliance, identity and management at Microsoft, told Quartz cyber attackers use extended language models (LLM) to become more productive. For example, they can use AI tools like ChatGPT to conduct reconnaissance on people and businesses to detect security vulnerabilities, improve their coding and password-cracking skills, and spreading false information.
“It basically comes down to finding information and directly launching these attacks to strengthen their own positions of influence and gain economic advantage,” Jakkal said of nation-state and financial crime actors targeting businesses in the framework of cyberattacks.
But while Microsoft develops its own AI tools, some employees reportedly think its AI work is too focused on its multi-year, multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI.
“The old Azure AI is basically just technical support for OpenAI,” a former Microsoft executive said, according to a report from Business Insider. “Eric Boyd (vice president of Microsoft’s Azure AI Platform) effectively maintains the OpenAI service. It is less of a driver of innovation than before. Now it’s more about computing for OpenAI. The beating heart of innovation is elsewhere.
