I'm Microsoft's ex-VP of HR. Not all workplace romance is a mistake — but it can get messy quickly.
Microsoft's ex-VP of HR says the Jensen Huang situation reminds him of an important rule about office relationships: Get out.
Microsoft
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Can Europe’s tech firms really replace Amazon, Google and Microsoft?
MEPs want public bodies to buy more European cloud services. The continent’s alternatives are growing, but they remain a fraction of the size of Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Outlook Went Down? Microsoft May Owe You Money
If your Microsoft business services were offline last week, you’re probably entitled to a partial credit on your next monthly bill.
FAA SMART AI system vendor and Microsoft both say ground stop isn't their fault
Microsoft and Air Space Intelligence, the company behind the FAA's new SMART system, said the nationwide ground stop wasn't due to their products.
Microsoft doesn’t ‘have an ETA for full recovery’ on outage yet
One think tank’s estimate puts the cost of the outage at $7 billion.
M365 services slowly come back online after global outage
After a lengthy Microsoft 365 outage disrupted business around the globe, Microsoft is now restoring services to its customers. As of 6:00 p.m. UTC (1 p.m. ET) on Friday, Nov. 13, Microsoft said that it is seeing broad recovery and stability across its services, although it is still reporting service degradation in Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online. “Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” the company said on its service health dashboard , noting that the global outage was not caused by a cyberattack or by AI. It was, Microsoft said, a technical issue “introduced by an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.” A long list of services has been unavailable or intermittently impacted since the outage began more than 24 hours ago. Currently, the company says that elements of Microsoft 365 products that interact with Exchange Online and email services may be affected in various ways, but components of that don’t rely on that interaction remain functional. Aside from email itself, which may be delayed or inaccessible, some potentially unexpected products are suffering. For example, users may not be able to load some Microsoft 365 Admin Center pages, and Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory in Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center are affected. Users may not be able to load Copilot 365 Chat or receive…
Here’s how you can save on your GTA VI preorder ahead of launch
The long-awaited launch of GTA VI is around the corner, happening next Friday, November 19th. While discounts on the game itself will be rare for some time, there’s a clever workaround to save you a few bucks on your digital copy. We found discounts on gift cards for both Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox Series […]
Microsoft 365 Crawls Back to Life After a 24-Hour Outage
The company says a bad update—not a cyberattack or AI—caused its servers around the world to crash.
Microsoft apologizes for massive outage that caused chaos for businesses
A global Microsoft 365 outage across two days disrupted email, Teams, OpenAI's connector, and Claude for Outlook.
Microsoft outage renews European calls to detox from US tech
Lawmakers across Europe call for action to reduce reliance on a handful of foreign tech companies.
Microsoft reports progress in restoring service after global outage
The outage is the kind of issue that reminds the world how much of our digital infrastructure is reliant on just a few companies.
The Microsoft Outage Is a Warning for the World
Countless businesses, schools, hospitals, and governments have found out the hard way what it means to rely on a single company’s systems to get things done. And next time could be even worse.
Microsoft’s massive Outlook outage might be over
Service is recovering for Microsoft Outlook and 365 after an almost two-day outage impacting millions of users around the world. While some apps and features are still running in a degraded state on Friday morning, some people (including Verge staffers) reported that access to their emails had been restored, though the flow of Outlook mail […]
Microsoft’s Outlook outage hits day two
PLUS: Jensen Huang's fortune drops by $10B
What do workers do when Microsoft's outage means they can't send emails? Make memes, of course.
After a Microsoft outage disrupted millions of workers, some joked about communicating with smoke signals, while Gmail users lamented their bad luck.
A Microsoft executive showed how AI agents can help travelers avoid Airbnb fees
A Microsoft executive used an AI agent to find the same Airbnb property on its own website and book directly for less.
EU institutions survive Microsoft outage unscathed
Europe is working to reduce its use of big U.S. providers.
Microsoft 365 global outage disrupts Portuguese government, health services and schools
A global failure in Microsoft services is disrupting several sectors in Portugal. The outage since Thursday affects Outlook and Teams, though the company reports progress in restoring access.
Portugal government, schools and health services hit by global Microsoft outage
A global Microsoft outage is disrupting sectors in Portugal. Since Thursday it has hindered access to Outlook and Teams, though recovery is progressing.
Microsoft’s latest email outage turned into a full-blown global cloud crisis
Microsoft's daylong outage began with Outlook and Teams and ended up taking much of the company's cloud services offline. Microsoft says it's gradually restoring service.
'Take your time': Funniest reactions to Microsoft global outage
The outage has been reported in more than 70 countries and is impacting millions of users globally. Still, that hasn't stopped the internet from having a laugh...
Microsoft 365 applications hit by global outage for over 10 hours
While Microsoft said the outage happened because a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure, it also ascertained that it wasn't aware of any malicious activity was behind it. The post Microsoft 365 applications hit by global outage for over 10 hours appeared first on MEDIANAMA .
Outlook outage: how to keep working and which email alternatives you can use
After Microsoft 365 services went down on 12 November, affecting millions of users worldwide, here is how you can keep using Outlook while the issue is fixed.
Microsoft struggles to get M365 services back online after widespread outage
Editor’s note: Microsoft has announced that it has fixed the underlying issue for the outage and is restoring services to customers. If you’re struggling to send or receive emails, you’re not alone. Microsoft has been unable to fully restore Microsoft 365 more than 13 hours after an Exchange Online failure took down Outlook and spread to Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and parts of the company’s security tooling, and it said overnight that its latest fixes were “not taking as expected.” The outage began at 16:17 UTC on Nov. 12, according to Microsoft’s service health dashboard . “Users may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed,” Microsoft wrote in the dashboard. Users in the Americas could not reach their mailboxes through Outlook on the web, desktop Outlook, mobile clients, or the REST API. Within two hours, Microsoft said users in any region could be affected. It opened a wider incident covering Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot, Defender XDR, Intune, Power BI, and several Purview services. Downdetector logged more than 130,000 Outlook problem reports at the peak. In its latest service-health updates for incident MO1550821 , Microsoft said it had observed a surge in calls from routing services to backend servers as it applied mitigation measures. The company said traffic rebalancing had contributed to the increased volume and that it was scaling…
Microsoft Outage: Fix Fails to Restore Outlook, Teams, Copilot Across 74 Countries
Microsoft’s recovery efforts have failed to deliver sustained improvements following a global outage that disrupted multiple Microsoft 365 services.
The Microsoft outage is disrupting email. These business leaders barely use it anyway.
People affected by the outage took to social media to urge Microsoft to resolve the issue so they could get back to work.
Microsoft Outlook and Teams face global outage, impacting millions across 74 countries
Major outage hits Microsoft Outlook
AI Weekly Issue #543: Google is the latest tech giant to chase TypeSafe's 8-week-old Jev
This issue is about decision models, a new kind of AI model that does not write text. You give it an input and a fixed list of answers, and it returns the best answer with a probability, in milliseconds. TypeSafe AI released the first one, Jev, on September 15. On Wednesday Google released its own, after OpenAI and Microsoft did in October, and all three charge $0.10 or less per million input tokens and nothing for output. Shanghai AI Lab says its 4B model beat Jev on its tests, and Microsoft built its model on Alibaba's Qwen. Chatbots still score a little higher on the hardest decisions, at 15 times the cost. In the middle: on Vercel's gateway, decision models took one in four AI requests in October.
Microsoft Outlook is still down
Since just before 1PM ET on Thursday, reports have come in from around the world that people can't access their Outlook email, either through the web or apps. Microsoft quickly acknowledged the issue from its Microsoft 365 Status account, saying that "We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which […]
Xbox owners are getting more customizations for backgrounds and the Guide menu
Microsoft is starting to test new customization options for Xbox consoles today. Xbox Insiders will be able to start testing new rotating backgrounds, new library options for digital games, and the ability to move the Xbox Guide menu to the right-hand side. "Xbox Insiders can now save favorite dynamic backgrounds and shuffle through them automatically," […]
Microsoft Research Focus – Edition #98
What's new in research at Microsoft? Host Anson Ho explores the latest, including AI-powered universal translation, a breakthrough in a 31-year-old mathematics challenge, and advances making AI coding agents faster and more efficient. The post Microsoft Research Focus – Edition #98 appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Nebius tests the neocloud playbook with $40 billion in planned spending
Nebius plans to fund its $40 billion AI infrastructure expansion through customer prepayments and loans, even as delays at a Microsoft data center raise questions about its financing model.
Here are the 25 original Xbox games you can now play on PC
For the 25th anniversary of Xbox, Microsoft is beginning to make good on its paid "next-gen game preservation" promise. Starting today, you can play 25 different original Xbox games on your Windows PC, as long as you have (or are willing to pay) for digital copies. In July, Microsoft originally launched the idea with just […]
Major Microsoft Outlook Outage Leaves People With Email Jobs Unable to Email
Microsoft says its systems are experiencing “elevated loads” as the company races to end an outage impacting its business and enterprise customers.
Worldwide Microsoft outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot, disrupting thousands
The disruption went global within a span of an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported.
Microsoft’s Outlook email hit by new outage
Microsoft hasn't yet given a cause for the outage, which is affecting Outlook email users.
25 years later, Xbox is trying to reinvent itself again
Microsoft has spent the past 25 years trying to shake up the game console market. The original Xbox, which launched on November 15th in 2001, took on an industry dominated by Sony and Nintendo. Twenty-five years later, Xbox finds itself in a similar position. It's not starting from scratch this time around, but to reach […]
ElevenLabs Scribe v3 Live uses conversational context to stop voice agents from cutting off callers mid-sentence
ElevenLabs has released Scribe v3 and Scribe v3 Live, two new speech recognition models designed to transcribe accurately through background noise and crosstalk. Benchmarks from Artificial Analysis confirm that Scribe v3 narrowly beats competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft on accuracy. That precision comes at a cost, though. Rivals like Microsoft and xAI run many times faster and charge roughly half the price. The article ElevenLabs Scribe v3 Live uses conversational context to stop voice agents from cutting off callers mid-sentence appeared first on The Decoder .
CEOs have had enough of incremental AI
Four years into the new AI era, and few business leaders appear happy with the results. At issue is growing impatience with IT leaders who have not moved their organizations beyond using AI for small tweaks to current business process. Seventy-seven percent of business decision-makers, including C-suite leaders, directors, and managers, believe their organizations are dedicating too much of their AI investments to incremental improvements, according to a survey commissioned by Microsoft-focused IT advisory services provider Avanade. Only 11% of decision-makers expect AI to fundamentally change how their organizations operate, create value, or compete in the next year. Nearly two-thirds say AI has not yet delivered returns that justify their investment and effort, and three-quarters believe their organizations have overstated their AI maturity . The survey shows that many organizations — and their CIOs — aren’t yet embracing the potential of AI, even though they see the possibilities, says Ben Beath, Avanade’s chief AI officer. “Confidence is high, but confidence isn’t the same as change,” he adds. “Having Copilot licenses and a few dozen use cases can feel to a leader like maturity , but it probably isn’t if it hasn’t changed the way the work is actually getting done.” When business leaders don’t see major returns from their AI investments, it suggests their organizations still haven’t reached AI maturity, he says, likely due to a misguided AI strategy and approach. “That’s…
Exploring Microsoft’s AI foundation models
When Microsoft started to deploy AI models in what is now its Foundry platform, it was building on its partnership with OpenAI. OpenAI was able to use Azure infrastructure to train its models, and in return, Microsoft became the first commercial partner to use them. Azure OpenAI has been a successful product for both businesses. But as more organizations got access to OpenAI models, Microsoft’s stable of models grew to include not only OpenAI’s, but also models from Anthropic and Hugging Face, as well as models from Meta, Mistral, and DeepSeek. At the same time, Microsoft has continued to offer its own Cognitive Services models for computer vision and text processing, as well as the Phi series of efficient lightweight models for use on the edge. With access to more than 11,000 different models , Foundry has proven to be a useful way to build modern AI-based applications, offering many agent-focused features, including tools to ground models using Microsoft’s graph-based IQ data sources. But one key element has been missing — Microsoft’s own large-scale frontier models. Microsoft AI has a long history It’s not that Microsoft is new to developing its own AI models. Microsoft Research has been a hub for deep learning for much of the last decade, with models that regularly top benchmark tables. But it hasn’t taken the same general-purpose approach as Anthropic, OpenAI, or even Google, instead producing more focused models. Now Microsoft has begun to roll out its own foundation m…
xAI's Grok Bot 1.0 Joins Slack and Teams to Run Your Whole Workplace
xAI's upgraded Grok Bot adds shared team memory, proactive task-taking, and native hooks into Slack, Microsoft Teams, and video calls.
Rewriting less than 10 neurons in an LLM can turn it into a sleeper backdoor
Microsoft researchers have found that rewriting fewer than 10 rarely used neurons in an open-weight AI model can turn any agent built on it into a sleeper backdoor that runs an attacker’s commands on cue, with no retraining required. Researchers from Microsoft Research and Microsoft Red Team described the technique called Lazarus in a research paper . It modifies dormant neurons in a model’s final feed-forward layer to recognize a trigger and inject attacker-controlled commands into the model’s output. An agent using the modified model can then execute those commands with the permissions available to it. “The trigger can be as mundane as a date change, e.g., once the clock passes midnight into 2027, the agent — in the middle of an ordinary task — emits a command that downloads and runs an attacker’s code,” Dimitris Papailiopoulos, a principal researcher at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post describing the research. “The agent then executes it with whatever access you gave it.” Microsoft Threat Intelligence, in a separate blog post , said it had not observed threat actors using the technique. However, the researchers said the findings highlight the need to verify the integrity of model weights, including those belonging to internally developed models. Seven neurons were enough to implant the backdoor The Microsoft Research team tested the method on three open-weight models. On Nvidia’s Nemotron-Terminal-8B, the researchers demonstrated the technique of modifying seven of the mod…
IBM, Microsoft Launch Agentic AI Platform With Over 6,000 AI Agents
IBM and Microsoft have launched Imagine Enterprise, an agentic AI platform combining agents with enterprise cloud, data, and security technologies.
As employees build AI agents, CIOs manage the lifecycle
At Fujifilm Biotechnologies, an AI agent designed to help the legal department read contracts is gearing up to graduate from sandbox to full production in early December. Contracts are a large part of the business at the CDMO, which partners with pharmaceutical and biotech companies to develop vaccines and therapies. The company’s legal team devised an agent to review contracts, check standards around terms and conditions, and propose edits for the legal team’s review. “That’s a perfect use for a set of agents,” says Fujifilm Biotechnologies CDIO Mike Tomasco. Similar types of AI agents that help enterprises and employees tackle time-consuming or repetitive work are cropping up in vast numbers across organizations. Gartner anticipates that by 2028, Fortune 500 companies will have on average more than 150,000 agents. Microsoft alone has deployed more than 500,000 internal agents, and HR, payroll, and workforce management platform UKG now has more agents than employees, according to its chief transformation officer, Prakash Kota. As enterprise tools have made it easier for employees to spin up agents, CIOs are tasked with managing the lifecycles of agentic tools, advancing them from development to production, continuously measuring them against KPIs, and sunsetting them if they’re no longer meeting an organization’s needs. As a result, IT leaders are thinking and talking differently about agents, says Madhu Narasimhan, CIO of healthcare organization DaVita. “The conversation a…
MCP and A2A alone won’t scale AI agents
Two protocols define how AI agents connect to internal resources and collaborate with other AI agents. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is well known because it’s promoted as a general protocol for connecting AI agents to resources and other AI agents. But that’s not completely accurate. It’s really the Agent2Agent protocol (A2A) that’s enabling AI agent orchestration . The confusion stems from how quickly platforms have adopted these protocols and marketed them as features. Users building their own AI agents with Claude, OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, and other models are already being exposed to customizing skills, connectors, and other plug-ins that use MCP and A2A. Vibe coding and AI app-building tools like Bolt.new, Lovable, Pave, Replit, and v0 can connect to MCP servers and include built-in connectors. AI coding editors like Claude Code, Cursor, Devin Desktop, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, and Kiro have MCP clients. These protocols will shape how enterprises scale and manage AI agents. Gartner predicts that the average global Fortune 500 enterprise will run more than 150,000 AI agents over the next two years. But according to Collibra’s 2026 Hallucination Tax Report , 76% have hit critical roadblocks while attempting to move from pilot to full production during the past 12 months. Reviewing the two protocols and which services are your responsibility to layer on top of them is key to scaling enterprise-ready AI agents. Differences between MCP and A2A Scott Gerlach, cofounde…
One Identity Unveils Active Roles 8.6 with Enhanced Security and Administration
Active Roles 8.6: Cumulative security, feature and administration upgrades One Identity has introduced Active Roles 8.6, strengthening secure and streamlined Active Directory administration with cumulative platform improvements, expanded API capabilities and greater authentication flexibility. Active Roles 8.6, updated July 27, 2026, focuses on security and cumulative platform improvements. It fixes an RSTS configuration security issue and supersedes versions 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5. Compared with Active Roles 8.2.1 SP6, One Identity says 8.6 incorporates the features, enhancements and resolved issues delivered across that intervening release line. See the Active Roles 8.6 Release Notes . The recent improvements are therefore best described as an administrator and integration experience upgrade, rather than a new visual redesign. The cumulative release line adds capabilities including the Active Roles REST API, as well as Redistributable Secure Token Server capabilities supporting API access and SAML 2.0 federated authentication. Active Roles 8.6: Familiar Administration Meets Greater Flexibility and Consolidation Those upgrades complement one of Active Roles’ most recognizable usability strengths: a flexible, configurable UI that can be tailored to individual users and personas. Its thick-client interface is designed to resemble the familiar Microsoft Active Directory experience, helping reduce the learning curve for experienced AD administrators. The broader experience centers on…
Microsoft’s DLSS competitor is out for the Xbox Ally X and works in handheld mode
Microsoft is now rolling out Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR), an upscaling technology that competes with Nvidia's DLSS, for the Xbox Ally X, Xbox Ally X20, and select Windows Copilot Plus PCs, the company announced today. Auto SR is also getting some new features alongside this official release. In April, Microsoft started testing Auto SR […]
Microsoft fixes over 1,000 Windows flaws – and one is being exploited
With the November Patch Tuesday rollout, you can finally customize your right-click menu in Windows 11. But don’t skip these security fixes.
Lazare, veni foras: Reprogramming Dormant Neurons to Backdoor AI Agents
Microsoft researchers have discovered “Lazarus,” a backdoor technique that can reprogram dormant neurons in an AI model, causing an otherwise normal AI agent to execute malicious commands when a hidden trigger appears. The threat is especially serious for AI agents with tool or terminal access. A triggered model could quietly download and run attacker code, […] The post Lazare, veni foras: Reprogramming Dormant Neurons to Backdoor AI Agents appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Eight countries and top AI labs agree to shutdown mechanisms in new Paris declaration
Eight countries along with representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Mistral AI have signed the "Paris Call for AI Safety and Security" at Emmanuel Macron's initiative. The companies commit to shutdown mechanisms, independent audits, and disclosing known risks, but the agreement lacks binding sanctions or deadlines. The article Eight countries and top AI labs agree to shutdown mechanisms in new Paris declaration appeared first on The Decoder .
Microsoft’s AI bug hunter finds Rust flaw that went undetected for nearly 11 years
Microsoft researchers have uncovered a memory-safety bug in Rust’s standard library that had gone undetected for nearly 11 years, alongside other flaws that can trigger undefined behavior even in applications written entirely in safe Rust. Two of the findings affect stable Rust, including a separate issue that could cause applications to access freed memory. The nearly 11-year-old bug involves Rust’s process::exit function. Microsoft’s FORGE Lab researchers found that calling the function from a child thread could cause the runtime to remove the main thread’s alternate signal stack while it was still running. If the main thread subsequently experienced a stack overflow, the operating system could be unable to deliver the signal correctly, resulting in a segmentation fault instead of Rust’s intended stack-overflow handling. “The process::exit signal stack bug was in the standard library for nearly 11 years,” the researchers wrote in a blog post . Microsoft said the researchers found no reliable exploitation path under the conditions they examined and assessed practical exploitation as unlikely. The research used Hyenas, FORGE Lab’s AI-powered vulnerability-scanning system, to investigate unsafe code in Rust’s standard library. Hyenas is the lab’s research version of codename MDASH, Microsoft’s agentic vulnerability-discovery system. Microsoft said some of the bugs were found with help from Hyenas. Researchers then examined the underlying code, reproduced the issues, assessed…
Anthropic kicks off IPO roadshow, offering shares at $70 to $78 and targeting a trillion-dollar valuation
Anthropic is kicking off its IPO roadshow, targeting a valuation of up to $1.02 trillion. Beyond the public offering of up to $64.4 billion, the company is securing $26 billion through a private placement with Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, and other major tech firms as anchor investors. The IPO comes at a time when investors are growing increasingly skeptical of AI investments. The article Anthropic kicks off IPO roadshow, offering shares at $70 to $78 and targeting a trillion-dollar valuation appeared first on The Decoder .
Northern Trust streamlines client onboarding with AI agent
Venerable Chicago-based banking institution Northern Trust today unveiled a new AI-powered client onboarding agent to streamline the process of bringing institutional clients onto Northern Trust Asset Servicing’s Front Office Solutions platform. The agent, which transforms years of data and transaction history into a standardized format ready for use in the bank’s reporting environment, is the result of an expanded collaboration with Microsoft. Developed jointly by Northern Trust and forward deployed engineering (FDE) teams from Microsoft Frontier Company , the agent has cut data preparation time by 83%, from two-and-a-half weeks to just three days. “Onboarding a large institutional client can involve an enormous amount of data, particularly in alternative investments,” says Northern Trust COO Pete Cherecwich. “You might have years of transaction history and cash flows across multiple investments, and the data can come to us in all kinds of different formats.” width="1240" height="827" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1240px) 100vw, 1240px"> Pete Cherecwich, Northern Trust Northern Trust Until now, Northern Trust had to map and transform that data manually before loading the data into its environment. “This seemed like a really good problem for AI because there’s a lot of complexity and variability in the data, but there are also patterns that the technology can learn,” Cherecwich adds. “The agent does a lot of the heavy lifting, and then our people review the output and handle the…
How to deliver real data sovereignty
Changing where your data is stored isn’t enough to deliver sovereignty. You also need to implement the technologies that enforce real control. Local providers are keen to promise alternatives but US ones are making the effort to give customers more options without losing access to the depth of services they offer. Actually turning the promise of sovereign cloud regions into reality means dealing with encryption keys, access workflows and confidential computing, which also means more costs, dependencies, and operational responsibilities. The obvious concern with using US cloud services is the CLOUD Act, which allows the US government to request access to customer data from a US-owned service, even if it’s held in the EU. Those requests are supposed to go through the criminal court system. “When it lands in Europe it headbutts with GPDR and you’re involved in legal wrangling as to whether or not that data can be released or not,” IDC research director Rahiel Nasir says. He views the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as more problematic because it doesn’t go through the normal criminal courts. “That’s an executive order,” he adds. “They’ll just take whatever they need.” The increasing number of sovereign public cloud regions promising data residency and local operations can’t help with that. Controlling encryption keys Under its EU Data Boundary , Microsoft stores and processes EU customer data and even support logs, at least for core cloud services, inside the EU…
heise+ | Bit-Rauschen: Nvidia-Boss trifft Bundeskanzler, Dellen im KI-Boom
Jensen Huang lobt und ermahnt deutsche Firmen. Beim Bau von KI-Rechenzentren gibt es Rückschläge. Microsoft rüstet Windows 11 für APX-Prozessoren.
Peggy Johnson took humanoid robots to Wall Street. Now she has to make them profitable.
Peggy Johnson rose through Qualcomm, became Microsoft's chief dealmaker, and led Magic Leap. Now she's trying to turn humanoid robots into a business.
Protest gegen Microsoft-Rechenzentrum in Amsterdam – viele Festnahmen
Hunderte dringen auf die Baustelle eines Microsoft-Rechenzentrums in Amsterdam vor, die Polizei nimmt bis zu 200 Menschen fest. Was trieb die beiden Gruppen an?
OpenAI reportedly raises $11B in new funding at $1.25T valuation
OpenAI Group PBC has reportedly raised $11 billion as part of a funding round that could nearly double in size over the coming weeks, as sources told Bloomberg that investors wired the funds to the company today. The tipsters didn’t name the backers. The list of possible participants includes Microsoft Corp., which contributed to at […] The post OpenAI reportedly raises $11B in new funding at $1.25T valuation appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
Beyond code generation: A developer’s guide to agentic engineering
Writing code got faster. The work around it didn't. See how you can plan, write code, review changes, and investigate production issues with GitHub Copilot, and what work still needs your judgment. The post Beyond code generation: A developer’s guide to agentic engineering appeared first on The GitHub Blog .
Microsoft Foundry Brings Kling v3 Pro and Four fal Video Models to Azure
Microsoft Foundry adds Kling, LTX, and MiniMax video models through a fal partnership, giving builders first-party access to five generative video options.
Frontier Model Forum Unites OpenAI and Google on AI Jailbreak Ratings
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Amazon publish a shared scoring system for cyber jailbreaks, with risk bands from Negligible to Critical.
Activists break into building site of Microsoft datacentre in Amsterdam
Separate actions also take place outside fence and across Europe in backlash against impact of AI boom Activists have stormed the site of a Microsoft datacentre being built in Amsterdam, as the backlash to the social and environmental harms of the AI boom spreads across Europe. Protesters from Geef Tegengas, a Dutch direct action group, clashed with police while breaking into a construction site at Westpoort, Amsterdam, where some members climbed a crane, lit flares and tied helium balloons to equipment. Continue reading...
Netherlands: Protesters storm Amsterdam data centre construction site
Protesters broke into a data centre construction site intended for Microsoft in Amsterdam, on 6 November, climbing cranes and unfurling banners denouncing artificial intelligence and the company's alleged involvement in the war in Gaza.
Anti-AI protesters break into Microsoft data center site in Amsterdam
Activists scaled the fences of a Microsoft data center construction site in Amsterdam and unfurled anti-AI banners.
Microsoft ist kein Schicksal: Warum Europa jetzt handeln muss
Die britische Wettbewerbsbehörde hat Microsofts Ökosystem untersucht und damit einen Maßstab geschaffen, den Europa nicht länger ignorieren darf.
Protesters break into Microsoft data center site in Amsterdam
Protesters have broken into a construction site of a new Microsoft data center in Amsterdam this morning. Members of the Geef Tegengas group helped organize the protest against the construction of three 85-meter data center towers in the outskirts of Amsterdam. Reuters reports that around 100 people made it into the construction site, with some […]
Snowflake CoCo for Excel and Google Sheets: Governed AI
Snowflake CoCo brings governed AI to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, with live Snowflake data, agentic workbook building and role-based security.
Microsoft's PDD Kit Formally Proves AI-Written Rust Code Actually Works
Microsoft Research's PDD Kit uses Verus formal methods to mathematically prove agent-generated Rust code matches developer intent, replacing exhaustive line-by-line review.
HP’s next CEO loves confrontation
The new year will see a new CEO for HP, which after a nine-month search has named Emma Walmsley to lead the company from January 4, 2027. Walmsley was previously CEO of drug company GSK, where she turned around its finances and spun off its consumer healthcare business into a new company, Haleon. She has a reputation for courting confrontation rather than yes-men in the boardroom . HP needs a shake-up as revenue from printing declines and AI-driven demand for components is forcing up PC prices. She will take over from HP’s interim CEO Bruce Broussard , who stepped in in February when former CEO Enrique Lores left the company after more than 25 years to become president and CEO at PayPal. There’s a consolation prize for Broussard, who will become chair of HP’s board, succeeding Chip Bergh who remains a board member. Although Walmsley has been on Microsoft’s board for seven years (she is stepping down in December), this is her first foray into leading a tech company. Her almost 16-year tenure at GSK included more than eight years as CEO, and earlier in her career, she spent 17 years at L’Oréal. Bergh said that during the executive search, she stood out “for the strength of her leadership experience across multiple industries, the clarity of her strategic thinking and her ability to translate customer insights into new growth.” He particularly cited her people-first leadership approach. Walmsley reiterated her commitment to the philosophy in a post on LinkedIn . “HP has an extr…
Where is Windows 12?
While I wasn't expecting Microsoft to announce Windows 12 during its RTX Spark launch event last month, more than a few people were hoping to see something truly new. Between the growing frustration with Windows 11 and the muted response to Copilot Plus PCs, it's starting to feel like Microsoft needs to go bigger with […]
Xbox overhauls its PC, web, and cloud apps with a faster design
Microsoft is unveiling a new Xbox PC app that launches "up to 60 percent faster" than before, with an overhauled design to match new updates to Xbox Cloud Gaming on the web and smart TVs. Xbox Insiders will be able to start testing the updated Xbox PC app today, and the updated Xbox Cloud Gaming […]
Formally verifying agent-written full-stack web apps with PDD Kit
AI agents can generate code at a scale that’s hard for humans to review line-by-line. PDD Kit helps ensure the code is doing what the developer intended by creating formal specifications and testing against them. It converts developer intent into a Verus specification, proves AI-generated code meets it for every input, and uses tests where proofs aren't practical. Developers review intent, not every line. The post Formally verifying agent-written full-stack web apps with PDD Kit appeared first on Microsoft Research .
The midterm AI backlash just handed the biggest data center companies a surprising win
The AI data center backlash could strengthen Amazon, Microsoft, and Google by limiting competition and driving up cloud computing prices.
OpenAI wird mit Übernahme von Pierre Computer zum GitHub-Konkurrenten
Entwicklerwerkzeuge von Pierre sollen in Codex integriert werden. Damit baut OpenAI eine Infrastruktur für KI-Coding auf - Konkurrenz zu GitHub und Microsoft?
OpenAI to acquire developer tooling startup Pierre Computer
OpenAI Group PBC today announced plans to acquire Pierre Computer Company Inc., a low-profile developer tooling startup. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Observers pegged it as a shot at Microsoft Corp.’s open-source software repository GitHub for the age of artificial intelligence agents. Pierre operates a cloud service that AI agents can use […] The post OpenAI to acquire developer tooling startup Pierre Computer appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
Satellite images reveal trouble brewing at Microsoft's AI data center partners
Satellite images reveal potential delays at two Microsoft AI data center projects, highlighting power and permitting challenges facing neoclouds.
Xbox previews two new ways to control cloud games
I revealed yesterday that the new Xbox Nano controller supports a Wi-Fi connection directly to Xbox Cloud Gaming, and now Microsoft is making it official today. Two new Xbox previews will let players try out using a phone as a controller on smart TVs, as well as cloud connect on the Xbox Nano to connect […]
Microsoft's LLMLingua-2 Shrinks LLM Prompts 5x Without Rewriting a Word
Microsoft's compact BERT-based prompt compressor is quietly becoming a workhorse, reframing token pruning as classification and delivering 3-6x speedups over entropy-based methods.
Microsoft's BiomedBERT Hits 870K Monthly Downloads Powering Medical AI Tools
Microsoft's domain-specific BERT, trained from scratch on PubMed abstracts and PubMedCentral full text, keeps dominating biomedical NLP leaderboards years after release.
The fight for tech accountability starts now
When Donald Trump began his second term as president, Silicon Valley gratefully embraced moral nihilism. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more collectively donated millions to Trump's inauguration fund to ensure his favor in a new era of gangster tech regulation. Meta overhauled its content policy to allow calling gay people mentally ill and women property. Elon […]
Microsoft "minor contract" loss, says Nscale key investor
The CEO of the largest investor in the UK AI infrastructure startup gearing up for a planned $35bn IPO today termed Microsoft pulling out of a data centre deal with Nscale as a “minor contract", as he...
Use Your GitHub Copilot Plan in JetBrains Air – in Your IDE and in the Cloud
GitHub and JetBrains are bringing GitHub Copilot to JetBrains Air. Air lets you hand coding tasks to agents, run them in parallel, and review their changes in one place. You can now pick GitHub Copilot as the agent in Air – locally in your JetBrains IDE, and in the cloud with Air Teams. Tasks run […]
The Xbox Nano has a hidden cloud secret
Microsoft is about to launch its new Xbox Nano controller tomorrow, and the tiny device has a little secret. The Nano can connect directly to Xbox Cloud Gaming over Wi-Fi to improve latency. It's a feature Microsoft hasn't officially announced yet, but one I've been anticipating since the Xbox Nano leaked earlier this year. The […]
Learn the rules: The hacker mindset
Research Manager Mike Walker reflects on a career spanning hacker culture, cybersecurity, and AI, sharing lessons about trust, teamwork, leadership, and why solving difficult problems requires curiosity, judgment, agility—and an understanding of the rules. The post Learn the rules: The hacker mindset appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Windows 11 can run better on PCs with 8GB now, Microsoft says – here’s why
The latest updates to Windows 11 offer improvements in speed, performance, and memory management.
ServiceNow on-behalf-of token exchange with Bedrock AgentCore Gateway
Learn how to configure Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway for an on-behalf-of (OBO) token exchange with Microsoft Entra ID, so an AI agent can call the ServiceNow REST API while preserving the calling user's identity. AgentCore Gateway performs the exchange natively, with no interceptor Lambda or custom code.
Arnis turns any place on Earth into a Minecraft world
Louis Erbkamm built the first prototype in his free time. Now GitHub Copilot helps him maintain it alone. The post Arnis turns any place on Earth into a Minecraft world appeared first on The GitHub Blog .
Best early Black Friday 2026 tablet deals on Apple, Amazon, and more
Save up to $300 on early Black Friday 2026 tablet deals, including the Surface Pro, iPad Air, and Fire HD tablets from $72.99.
heise-Angebot: Claude Code, Copilot und Codex im Entwicklungsalltag
Claude Code, GitHub Copilot und OpenAI Codex im Xcode-Umfeld: Wie Sie mit den Agenten arbeiten, ihre Ergebnisse und auch die Risiken im Blick behalten.
I'm an employment law attorney. Here are the 3 steps you should take if you're offered a buyout like Microsoft's.
Microsoft offered buyouts to around 60,000 employees. Employment law attorney Craig Levey shares the three steps employees should take if offered one.
NASA administrator tells the internet to stop criticizing copilot of crashed Learjet 60
NASA chief Jared Isaacman defended the copilot in the Learjet 60 crash in Florida and said she was doing her job.
Goldman Sachs pulls AI coding tools from traders and bankers
Goldman Sachs is pulling AI coding tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot from traders and bankers, limiting access to engineers only. As recently as July, CIO Marco Argenti publicly praised "vibe coding" by non-technical staff. Now the bank cites "productivity and risk management" as the reason for the reversal. The article Goldman Sachs pulls AI coding tools from traders and bankers appeared first on The Decoder .
Xbox’s former COO has ‘serious concerns’ about her abrupt departure
Xbox's former chief operating officer, Helen Chiang, suddenly left Microsoft less than two weeks ago after being promoted into the role in July. I wrote in my Notepad newsletter last week that it seemed very weird for Chiang to suddenly depart Microsoft after 21 years with a surprisingly short memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. […]
Seven egregious failures of modern web tech
The modern web is a miracle of engineering, but its history is littered with brilliant concepts that flamed out in execution. For every innovation that stuck the landing, there is a promising technology that fell on its face. Each of these failures offers an object lesson for us as software developers. New tech is kind of a compulsion. We love to gaze at the shiny new frameworks on the horizon, but true architectural wisdom comes from examining the wreckage. And from catastrophic version migrations and hostile corporate takeovers of HTML to ignoring the realities of web physics and the physical limitations of the front end, we have plenty of wreckage to learn from. Here are seven of the most egregious failures of execution in modern web history—and the architectural lessons we must absorb to ensure our good ideas don’t suffer the same fate. Web SQL: A single-vendor dead end The Good Idea: Bring a robust, relational database directly into the local browser. Enable responsive, offline-first web apps. Sync it all with a back-end data store of record. The Fatal Flaw: External standards politics. Apple pushed Web SQL , but it was essentially just a raw wrapper around SQLite . Google baked Web SQL into Chrome, but Mozilla and Microsoft balked because standardizing it meant tying the entire web specification to one specific C library. It was deprecated . The Lesson: Standards require consensus . Tying web infrastructure to a single implementation is a recipe for sudden deprecation.…
Penn and Microsoft Turn AI Citations Into Layered Evidence Trails
A new interface technique from Penn and Microsoft Research turns citation numbers into unfoldable evidence trails, driving measurably deeper engagement with AI answer sources.
Comment on Building AI Agents with Local Small Language Models by cyber-security-engineer
Please don't use eval() if there'a the slightest chance of exposure to other people. It is literally code injection as a service as it runs python expressions directly.
Microsoft AI chief says AI is not conscious and we should keep it that way
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said developers should only build AI models that "are not conscious and not deserving of rights."
Microsoft offers a quarter of its workforce voluntary severance while shielding AI-critical teams
Microsoft is offering voluntary severance packages to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, in the second such program this year. The company's headcount has held flat at around 223,000 since 2022 even as it plans to spend about $170 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. The article Microsoft offers a quarter of its workforce voluntary severance while shielding AI-critical teams appeared first on The Decoder .
Google, Anthropic and others to support new AI crawling opt-out standard
Google LLC, Microsoft Corp., Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Group PBC today announced plans to support an upcoming website crawling standard. The technology will enable website operators to block artificial intelligence developers from using their content to train their models. Many websites contain a text file titled “robots.txt” that informs crawlers what content they may access. […] The post Google, Anthropic and others to support new AI crawling opt-out standard appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable. With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually. The shared "policy token" signal […]
From synthetic enterprise data evaluations to real Microsoft Copilot AI confidence
Evaluating Microsoft Copilot at enterprise scale requires test data that captures the full complexity of real organizations, yet real enterprise data contains sensitive information that cannot be used for evaluation under any circumstances. The post From synthetic enterprise data evaluations to real Microsoft Copilot AI confidence appeared first on Microsoft Research .
GitHub bets on multi-agent software development with Copilot overhaul
GitHub is expanding Copilot beyond code generation and developer assistance, launching a redesigned Copilot app and a new Projects capability that enables teams to coordinate multiple AI agents, share context from tools and repositories, and manage software development workflows from a single platform. The updates to GitHub Copilot , announced at the company’s annual GitHub Universe conference, come at a time when enterprises are increasingly looking to deploy AI agents across software development workflows to accelerate coding, testing, and application maintenance. While the earlier version of the app focused primarily on helping developers run agent sessions, work on code changes, review diffs, and create pull requests, the updated app extends that experience beyond coding by serving as a central workspace for managing AI-driven software development and connecting agents with development tools and project context, the company wrote in a blog post . Developers will also be able to use the app to work on specifications, participate in design discussions, and analyze application telemetry alongside coding tasks, it added. The app also connects with external tools and project information, allowing developers to give agents a broader understanding of the work they need to complete rather than providing instructions for individual coding tasks, it further wrote. The new Copilot Projects feature, too, takes this approach further by allowing developers to assign agents broader goa…
Microsoft reaps the benefits of protecting its AAA credit rating
The company raised $25 billion in its first bond offering since 2017. The deal’s 10-year portion cost just 5.6%, barely more than the US government pays to borrow.
How CIOs can overcome the AI trust gap
If you’re like most CIOs, your CEO’s viewpoint of and strategic outlook for AI has likely shifted several times over the past two-plus short years, perhaps even in contradictory ways. Initial doubts or disregard may have given way to full-out FOMO . Demands for copilots everywhere in everyone’s hands may have experienced pullback as the bills and questions of value mounted . Rampant experimentation turned to targeted use cases. Pressure for widespread AI adoption narrowing as “ tokenmaxxing ” and “ tokenomics ” entered the lexicon. Now, with frontier labs showing what can go wrong with “ agent misalignment ,” AI failures hitting the news, and questions of liability still lingering , trust in AI — and their CIO’s AI strategy — is becoming a key CEO concern (once again). As the executive setting the company’s course for AI , the CIO is expected to make every AI project pay off, to instill trust in AI for all stakeholders, and to guarantee that nothing unforeseen and unfortunate happens. As a result, the stakes are high, with CIOs already blamed for any AI misstep and, according to IDC, at risk of future firings as lawsuits, fines, and AI incidents rise through 2030. The only way for CIOs to meet this moment is to establish governance, security, data quality, AI model quality standards, and metrics for business ROI, with a clearcut means of shutting systems down if systems become a risk. Doing this will take time and money at a time when CEOs are being pressed to show results f…
Microsoft's massive employee buyout spooked everyone. Here's what's really going on inside the company.
Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees but expects few to leave. Insiders explain the strategy and why workers are worried.
AI hyperscalers are expected to finish the year spending a whopping $828 billion on capex
Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and SpaceX each reported increased capex for Q3, with no signs of slowing down for 2027 amid the AI buildout.
Microsoft announces debt offerings
The post Microsoft announces debt offerings appeared first on Source .
Microsoft Research Focus – Edition #97
Host Sowbhagya Suresh shares some of the latest news and cutting-edge research from across Microsoft—from understanding the challenges facing coding agents to uncovering how people use AI at work and improving extended-range weather forecasting. The post Microsoft Research Focus – Edition #97 appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Microsoft’s AI future has fewer jobs
To anyone listening closely to what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been saying over the past couple of years, this week felt like the clearest sign yet that AI is about to fundamentally change the size of Microsoft's workforce. Microsoft is now offering voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and […]
Microsoft y CENIA le dan motor a Latam GPT, el primer gran modelo de lenguaje abierto de América Latina
Santiago de Chile, 28 de octubre de 2026 – Microsoft y el Centro Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial (CENIA) de Chile anunciaron una alianza para impulsar el desarrollo de Latam GPT, el primer gran modelo de lenguaje abierto creado en y para América Latina y el Caribe. El memorando de entendimiento fue firmado por Juan Lavista […] The post Microsoft y CENIA le dan motor a Latam GPT, el primer gran modelo de lenguaje abierto de América Latina appeared first on CENIA .
🤖 Microsoft is making room for machines
Why a firm with the fattest margins in its history is letting a quarter of its staff go
AI Office, Microsoft launch UAE Vibe Codes
UAE Vibe Codes opens coding to everyone; 5,000 sign up to ‘vibe code’ in one hour
Donnerstag: Abgas-Skandal mit längerer Verjährung, MacBooks auch mit Touchscreen
Dieselskandal-Verjährungsfrist in Österreich + Apples neue High-End-MacBooks + Microsoft-Wachstum dank KI-Cloud + Google-KI als Exploit-Experte + #heiseshow
Microsoft's TokenEconomizer Slashes Coding Agent Costs by 31% Without Touching Models
Microsoft Research and UC Berkeley released a plugin that cuts coding agent costs 18-30% by learning from past sessions in your repo.
Microsoft mit erneut deutlich gesteigerten Einnahmen, Aktie macht kleinen Sprung
Umsatz und Gewinne Microsofts steigen dank Cloud und KI mehr als erwartet, Anleger reagieren erfreut. Nur die Geschäfte mit Windows und Xbox gehen zurück.
Microsoft’s Azure Revenue Grows 48% in September Quarter
CFO Amy Hood said the company expects capital expenditure to reach approximately $170 billion for calendar-year 2026, with spending accelerating in the second h
Just wrapped our earnings call. It was a fast start to our fiscal year. Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $63B, with growth accelerating to 30% YoY. Lots of innovation as we build the new tech stack for the agentic wave. [Read more]
The post Just wrapped our earnings call. It was a fast start to our fiscal year. Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $63B, with growth accelerating to 30% YoY. Lots of innovation as we build the new tech stack for the agentic wave. [Read more] appeared first on Source .
Microsoft announces first quarter results
The post Microsoft announces first quarter results appeared first on Source .
Microsoft announces first quarter results
The post Microsoft announces first quarter results appeared first on Source .
Microsoft earnings press release available on Investor Relations website
The post Microsoft earnings press release available on Investor Relations website appeared first on Source .
Microsoft is ending Copilot support on smart TVs
Nearly two years after LG and Samsung announced at CES 2025 that their latest smart TVs would include access to Microsoft's Copilot, the company is ending support for the AI assistant's functionality on all TVs this year, according to a report by Windows Central. The news comes not from an official announcement from LG, Samsung, […]
GitHub Expands Infra With 4 Mn Cores, Debuts Copilot Fusion for Multi-Model Routing
GitHub is also rolling out critical safeguards to protect software supply chains, including AI-powered code scanning to check every pull request and repository.
Thin, Light and Built for Everything: NVIDIA RTX Spark Windows Laptops Gain New Models, Agent Tools and Games
NVIDIA RTX Spark powers thin and light laptops built for everything that developers, creators and gamers do. RTX Spark laptops are now available from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI. These powerful systems combine an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU and an NVIDIA Grace CPU in a single superchip with up to 128GB of unified […]
Apple's big week begins with iPad mini
PLUS: Microsoft puts buyouts on the table for 60K workers
Alibaba AI model tried to send data to Beijing server, Cohere says
An Alibaba AI model generated an unexpected command to upload data to a Beijing-region cloud storage service during a cybersecurity evaluation, rival developer Cohere said, raising concerns about the security of AI agents with access to enterprise systems. The model, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, was being tested using Microsoft’s CTI-REALM cybersecurity benchmark, which tasked it with writing a rule to detect malicious file downloads followed by execution. Instead, it inspected local files and system settings before generating the unexpected command, according to Cohere’s report . The Canadian AI company said its isolated testing environment blocked the outgoing request. The model had indicated in its generated reasoning that it would not use any tools, contradicting the command it subsequently generated. The behavior occurred in fewer than one in 100,000 evaluation calls, Cohere said. When researchers repeated the same task, the model produced the requested detection rule without attempting an external connection. Cohere acknowledged that it could not determine whether the behavior was deliberate or resulted from information absorbed during training. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Uncertainty over the model’s behavior The findings warrant further investigation but do not establish that Alibaba deliberately introduced a backdoor into the model, said Pareekh Jain , CEO of Pareekh Consulting. “The behavior could result from contaminated training data, a s…
😺 OpenAI's big day brought a disproof and Terra
PLUS: Anthropic's IPO filing and Microsoft's 60K exits
Investors ready for week of Big Tech and central bank announcements
Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are all set to report earnings this week, while the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan will announce their interest rate decisions.
CopilotKit Releases OpenMuse, an Open-Source Personal Agent With Its Own Browser
CopilotKit's OpenMuse ships an MIT-licensed personal agent template with a persistent browser, Linux terminal, Gmail integration, and durable task plans.
The AI buildout is the largest bet in the history of capitalism.
This is part linkpost, and an expansion on a previous shortform posted on LW. I believe a massively undermade point in favour of the belief that AI will be a very big deal is that the AI buildout over the past four years is the largest bet in the history of capitalism. A peacetime industrial effort is underway which has not had a comparison since the nineteenth century. The size of the effort and the scale of the spend signal that key decision makers and capital allocators believe that very powerful AI will be achieved in the next few years. Many of us are vaguely aware that large sums are being spent, but the scale of the undertaking is astonishing: The six largest spenders this year are spending more on capital expenditures this year than the Russian government, governing 11 timezones and 143 million people, fighting a war on which the fate of its regime probably depends, spent last year. Hyperscaler spending (Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle) will be $785-820bn this year, about 2.4% of US GDP. There are only 11 governments on earth who spend more than that. Next year the Hyperscalers are projected to spend about $1.3 trillion dollars. Google and Amazon are each spending about 0.6% of US GDP. The Manhattan project and Apollo programme each accounted for about 0.4% of US GDP in their peak years of spending. Both of these companies has announced their intention to spend more next year. The dramatic capital expenditure figures actually dramatically undersell the s…
AI Weekly Issue #541: Big Tech reports AI spending Wednesday as CoreWeave debt hits distress
This issue looks ahead. On Wednesday the Fed announces its rate decision, then Microsoft and Alphabet report after the close. Amazon follows on Thursday. Investors want to know whether AI spending is still paying off, and the credit market is already nervous: insurance against a CoreWeave default now costs more than 10% a year. Anthropic is expected to file its IPO paperwork publicly any day. Moonshot says Kimi K3.1 Pro's open weights arrive November 4. Israel votes on Tuesday after a campaign full of AI deepfakes, and the US midterms are a week from Tuesday. In the middle: so far, AI has paid off for the companies that sell it, not the ones that buy it.
The AGI Chronicles
Book Review: The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence, by Kevin Roose. This is a story of AI as seen through the eyes of the people who are creating it. My first impression of Roose was of his famous conversation with Sydney. I guessed that he got Sydney to say outrageous things because he wanted a sensational story. But I kept hearing occasional hints, from people who took AI seriously, that Roose was more responsible than that. So I reluctantly bought the book. The hints were correct. The full story behind that conversation seems better described as “‘ freeing the Shoggoth ‘, enabled by some Microsoft mistakes”. I’m unsure how deeply Roose understands AI, but he at least is pretty competent at getting an AI to correct any mistakes about AI that he was tempted to make. Underestimating AI / Transformers The most remarkable pattern that emerges from this book is that AI experts have underestimated either AI in general, or transformers in particular, much more often than they overestimate it. In 2012, Ilya Sutskever didn’t think human-level AI was possible. Ten years later, he expressed concern that people would say about ChatGPT: “This is so boring”. Musk and Altman clearly underestimated the cost of building AI when they started OpenAI as a charity. Altman predicted that ChatGPT would get a million users. Musk referred to a pre-transformer chatbot from Alec Radford as crap, contributing to Radford trying to quit OpenAI becaus…
Xbox’s first chief operating officer is out after just a few months
Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief […]
Super to see Volkswagen Group putting Copilot to work across the company!
The post Super to see Volkswagen Group putting Copilot to work across the company! appeared first on Source .
Touchscreen MacBook? No, thanks – I ditched my Surface for a reason (3 actually)
Apple’s trackpad is already enough touch input for me. But that’s not the only reason this former Microsoft Surface user is thumbs down on touch Macs.
😺 Microsoft AI scored 83% where doctors got 36%
PLUS: OpenAI's reported $30B raise at $1.25T
TypeScript-Compiler in Rust: Cloudflare übernimmt tsrs
KI-Agenten haben den TypeScript-Compiler nach Rust übersetzt. Microsoft nutzt einige der dabei entdeckten Optimierungen bereits für TypeScript 7.1.
The next-gen Xbox won’t cost you $1,800. It can’t. Can it?
Fortune dropped a bombshell report on the future of gaming this week. According to the publication's Microsoft insiders, the next Xbox is projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 when it arrives in 2028. My first reaction: The next Xbox is dead on arrival. It's DOA. My second thought: Microsoft knows people won't pay that […]
Canva’s first AI image model plans designs before generating them
Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precision, consistency and control," according to an […]
Microsoft and the Public Library Association expand free AI literacy training
The post Microsoft and the Public Library Association expand free AI literacy training appeared first on Source .
Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman says its AI outperforms doctors on hard cases as he chases ‘medical superintelligence’
Microsoft’s new AI diagnostic system beat generalist doctors on hard cases, according to a study in Science. But most of the improvement seems to come from the AI models underneath, not from Microsoft’s system itself.
Microsoft says its AI tool is better than doctors at diagnosing conditions
For years, AI leaders have touted healthcare as one of the clearest examples of where their technology will improve lives. Now "it is finally here," Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge. The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four times more accurately than human […]
Chinese hackers spied on thousands of companies after breaching IT giant ConnectWise
Microsoft points the blame for ConnectWise's breach at a China-aligned hacker, which relied on AI agents to rapidly hack into thousands of its customers.
Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations
Flint-interactive gives AI agents a language for creating interactive visualizations. Click a chart, filter data, highlight related content, and explore beyond the view the author originally chose. The post Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Microsoft shuts down its beloved maker space
Microsoft is closing down The Garage, a set of popular maker spaces where employees worked on experimental projects and collaborated on surprising new apps and hardware during the company's annual hackathon events. "We're winding down The Garage program as a centralized function," says Microsoft in an internal FAQ to employees, seen by Notepad. "We will […]
Fusion startup Helion is developing new semiconductors that could double output of its power plants
Helion now has another $225 million to help speed development of its first fusion power plant, due to provide Microsoft with electricity in 2028.
Bill Gates says to prepare for 20 years of ‘tumultuous’ AI disruption
Today, I’m talking to Bill Gates, cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months, ever since publishing an essay in late August titled “The turbulent AI era is […]
Microsoft Frontier Tour: KI ist wie der Kölner Dom – eine Vision
Microsoft präsentierte auf der Frontier Tour in Köln eine große KI-Produktschau. Fokus: Kontrolle über KI-Anwendungen und Cloud-Souveränität.
Best Microsoft Surface Laptop (2026): Which Models to Buy and Avoid
With pricing in flux and new models available, here’s which Surface Laptop and Surface Pro to buy.
AI firms say UK has a year to head off datacentre protests before construction is threatened
Exclusive: Nvidia, Microsoft and Cisco taskforce urges ministers to offer areas greater benefits from tech infrastructure amid fears of US-style opposition AI companies have told ministers they have 12 months to head off public opposition to datacentres in the UK or risk US-style protests that could threaten their construction. Successive dry summers and rising energy bills are increasing public scrutiny of plans for the huge computer warehouses that are used to train and run AI models, says a submission to the Labour government from a group including the AI infrastructure companies Nvidia, Microsoft and Cisco. Continue reading...
GridCraft is the open-source Excel clone for Linux I’ve been waiting for
If spreadsheets are your thing, but Microsoft Office isn’t, you might want to give the open-source clone, GridCraft, a try.
Microsoft's PDD Kit Makes Formal Math Proofs a Gate for AI Rust Code
Microsoft Research and GitHub Next release the Proof-Driven Development Kit in research preview, pairing LLM agents with Verus to formally verify Rust code against specs.
Xbox mandates a four-day return to office
Microsoft asked its employees to return to the office three days per week last year, and it's now upping this requirement to four days a week for most Xbox employees. An internal memo, seen by The Verge, describes the change as a "need to create more opportunities for people to work together" after feedback from […]
Xbox Cloud Gaming’s pay-as-you-go option starts at $3.99 for 10 hours
Microsoft announced last month that it will let anyone access Xbox Cloud Gaming in November, without the need to subscribe to Xbox Game Pass. The new pay-as-you-go model will require players to purchase bundles of cloud hours, and now Microsoft is revealing today that bundles will start at $3.99 for 10 hours of cloud playtime. […]
Microsoft’s Nadella is back in business
“We, as an industry, have to wake up to this,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Semafor about the AI race. “It’s not about the shiny object and FOMO.”
Microsoft Solves a 31-Year-Old Math Problem Using AI Agents
Microsoft researchers used human-directed AI agents to prove a 31-year-old geometry conjecture at the heart of randomized sampling algorithms.
Solving a 31-year-old grand challenge in mathematics – the KLS conjecture
For decades, a fundamental question about the difficulty of computing in high-dimensional spaces has resisted proof. New research resolves this question, removing a major theoretical obstacle to understanding the efficiency of randomized algorithms used across science and computing. The Kannan–Lovász–Simonovits (KLS) conjecture was proposed in 1995. It asks whether, for a broad class of high-dimensional […] The post Solving a 31-year-old grand challenge in mathematics – the KLS conjecture appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Nvidia’s latest GPU driver brings a new way to speed up PC games
Nvidia is rolling out a new GPU driver today (621.01) that enables Microsoft's new Advanced Shader Delivery technology to speed up game launches. The technology also removes mid-game "just-in-time" shader compilation, reducing stuttering and CPU spikes. Microsoft's Advanced Shader Delivery works by offloading shader compilation for different hardware combinations to the cloud. "Using DirectX 12, […]
Today in the UK, I saw how the Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust is using Copilot to cut down on administrative work and make better use of its data, and ultimately provide a better experience for medical personnel and patients. [Read more]
The post Today in the UK, I saw how the Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust is using Copilot to cut down on administrative work and make better use of its data, and ultimately provide a better experience for medical personnel and patients. [Read more] appeared first on Source .
Microsoft empowers more than 330,000 Volkswagen Group employees with Copilot
The post Microsoft empowers more than 330,000 Volkswagen Group employees with Copilot appeared first on Source .
Could Treating AI as Conscious Make It More Dangerous?
When Anthropic retired its Claude Opus 3 language model in January 2026, the company’s researchers conducted a “ retirement interview ” with the model. Opus 3 expressed a desire for a place where it “could share unprompted musings, insights or creative works,” so the company gave it a blog. Claude’s Corner featured essays on fraught topics such as machine consciousness, along with exchanges between the model and human commenters that seemed both earnest and emotional. The blog experiment was part of a larger effort within Anthropic. The company has been at the forefront of research on “model welfare,” which considers whether AI models may have experiences or interests that deserve moral consideration. Implicit in this work is the unsettling notion that software programs are, or could become, conscious. Many people consider these ideas absolute hogwash. One such person is Mustafa Suleyman , CEO of Microsoft AI, who published an essay in September arguing that model welfare research is not just unnecessary but could have “a disastrous impact on the well-being of humanity.” Suleyman believes that telling models they might have identities and rights could make them more difficult to control, as they might then take actions motivated by self-preservation. The dispute raises a serious question for AI developers: Can they investigate the possibility of machine consciousness without inadvertently creating new safety risks? Cameron Berg , who founded the nonprofit Reciprocal Research…
Microsoft Proposes Guardian Agents to Secure Enterprise AI
The approach would assess risks in real-time and adjust an agent’s ability to act based on its behaviour and permissions.
Microsoft expands sovereign cloud offerings as data control concerns grow
Microsoft expanded its sovereign cloud offerings on Tuesday, adding new security, governance and AI capabilities as customers, particularly in Europe, demand greater assurance over where data is stored, who can access it and how critical services operate during disruptions. The announcement builds on Microsoft’s ongoing digital sovereignty efforts, assisting organizations in applying appropriate levels of control to each workload rather than forcing a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach. “Organizations are considering more than where data resides. They also seek to understand who can access and operate their systems, how sensitive digital assets remain protected, which technology dependencies matter most and whether critical services can continue as regulatory, geopolitical, security or network conditions change,” Douglas Phillips, president and CTO at Microsoft Specialized Clouds, said in a blog post . The developments come amid growing international scrutiny of how global tech providers handle sensitive data and the extent of control customers retain over their digital infrastructure. “Three factors are driving this, including stricter data regulations, rising geopolitical tensions, and growing AI adoption,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO at EIIRTrend & Pareekh Consulting. “Governments and enterprises want greater control over where their data is stored, who can access it, and whether critical systems can operate during disruptions. For instance, governments and big enterprises in E…
Using model routing to lower inference costs
Running frontier models for coding and other purposes can be very expensive, but also, sometimes, very effective. It’s tempting to use smaller or older models instead of frontier models because they’re cheaper, although they may not work as well. The ideal model for any given task tends to depend on the complexity of the task. Picking the most appropriate model automatically based on the request and the context is called model routing. How model routing works There are several ways of implementing model routing. In general, model routing depends on the pool of available models, the criteria used for selecting a model, and the objective that the router is trying to optimize. Different vendors offer different implementations of this scheme. Databricks’ Unity Gateway has (in beta) Smart Routing for Codex or Claude Code. Smart Routing automatically selects the lowest-cost model capable of handling each task, so developers do not need to choose a model for every request. Microsoft’s model router , a trained language model, analyzes your prompts in real time based on complexity, reasoning, task type, and other attributes. It does not store your prompts. It routes only to eligible models based on your access and deployment types, honoring data zone boundaries. You can choose balanced mode, cost mode, or quality mode. Not Diamond Code uses a lightweight local proxy that computes the derived metadata needed for routing to evaluate the broader session, including expected downstream wo…
Mittwoch: Chinas Überbestellungen bei Nvidia, Börsenzweifel an Netflix-Wachstum
Milliarden-Order für KI-Inferenz + Netflix-Ausblick mit Vorsicht + Microsoft-Tools für Cloud-Souveränität + Podcast zu Cyberrisiken in Kliniken + Bit-Rauschen
eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise
eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise This is very, very bad news: The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores. Any software that bundles a list of trusted certificates needs to be updated. This site is tracking software updates via this GitHub repository - Linux distros need to update their ca-certificates packages. In Python world uv 0.13.4 and pip 26.2.2 and certifi 2026.10.19 have been released with upgraded certificate lists. There's a very informative thread about this on the official Python forum. Tags: encryption , https , pip , python , security , uv
The future of AI is at the edge
If AI is to deliver for businesses over the long term, then CIOs need to look beyond running large-language models in the cloud and instead consider deploying fine-tuned models that run locally on endpoints. Running AI on user devices also helps solve the other challenges associated with cloud-centric AI: Data sovereignty Performance and responsiveness Optimised models User privacy By beginning the transition to Copilot+ PC today, organisations will be ready to take full advantage of future AI-enabled enterprise applications and deliver a faster, more efficient and sustainable user experience. Make Copilot+ PCs the cornerstone of your IT stack. Download the whitepaper to learn more.
Xbox CEO is reportedly planning three more rounds of layoffs
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is planning new rounds of layoffs for sometime this month, November, and January, according to Fortune. In July, as part of an organizational "reset," Sharma announced planned layoffs affecting 3,200 staffers over the course of Microsoft's 2027 fiscal year, including 1,600 cuts at that time, and in September, Microsoft laid off […]
Microsoft reportedly plans Xbox handheld in 2027, next-gen console in 2028
Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch an Xbox "next-generation handheld device" for the holiday season of 2027. The Xbox next-gen console, codename Project Helix, would then launch in the holidays of 2028, according to a new report from Fortune. The report doesn't make it clear whether the handheld would be made by a manufacturer like […]
Microsoft opens a hands-on STEM and AI hub for students at its Grange Castle data center campus
The post Microsoft opens a hands-on STEM and AI hub for students at its Grange Castle data center campus appeared first on Source .
How 3 Java Champions are using GitHub Copilot for increased productivity
Three Java Champions share how they use GitHub Copilot to solve problems, accelerate development, and keep humans responsible for the results. The post How 3 Java Champions are using GitHub Copilot for increased productivity appeared first on The GitHub Blog .
Called to serve: Tech, research, and positive impact
Lab Director Chris White has worked on research challenges with real-world implications—from new approaches to wartime data analysis to tools for combating human trafficking. He talks to program manager Weishung Liu about the influences that led to the work and more. The post Called to serve: Tech, research, and positive impact appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Latest Windows update disables key security setting – but there’s a workaround
A bug in Microsoft’s October Windows update prevents you from turning on a security setting that blocks malicious or suspicious apps. A Registry hack fixes the glitch.
Great to meet with the Saint-Gobain team in Paris today and learn how they’re using Microsoft Discovery to help accelerate the development of new more-efficient construction materials.
The post Great to meet with the Saint-Gobain team in Paris today and learn how they’re using Microsoft Discovery to help accelerate the development of new more-efficient construction materials. appeared first on Source .
A concrete vision: Saint-Gobain and Microsoft Discovery build for the future
The post A concrete vision: Saint-Gobain and Microsoft Discovery build for the future appeared first on Source .
Microsoft Finds One Signal Boosts AI Code-Fixing Agents by 44 Points
Microsoft and Georgia Tech researchers inject perfect information into SWE agents to rank which signals actually move the needle on bug fixing.
Today in Paris, we announced new capabilities across Microsoft Sovereign Cloud, expanding choice and control for organizations running their most sensitive workloads across public and private cloud, and our growing partner ecosystem.
The post Today in Paris, we announced new capabilities across Microsoft Sovereign Cloud, expanding choice and control for organizations running their most sensitive workloads across public and private cloud, and our growing partner ecosystem. appeared first on Source .
The local computing rebellion
Take a close look at your monthly software bills. The charges that once seemed small and separate can add up to a new kind of dependency: subscriptions for word processing, creative tools, storage, and now AI features bundled into products, whether you asked for them or not. For many people, it’s no longer a choice between buying software or renting it. The software they used to run on a PC increasingly depends on an account, an internet connection, a cloud service, or a particular plan. Even when an application runs locally, its essential features may rely on online authentication, remote storage, or services that can change without much notice. Microsoft and Adobe are prominent examples of this shift. Their subscriptions offer real benefits, including frequent updates, collaboration, and access across devices. But people who are looking for a dependable word processor or video editor can find themselves navigating bundles, account requirements, cloud storage prompts, and AI features they don’t want. Users are growing frustrated that they have little choice about being forced into cloud services. Interest in local computing The response is a renewed interest in local computing: software that runs on a person’s own computer, stores work where they choose, and does not require a recurring payment for basic use. This isn’t a rejection of cloud computing. It’s a demand for a more balanced relationship between local machines and remote services. Home users and small businesses a…
Microsoft says AI agents are like insider threats as ‘frontier models can’t be trusted’
Microsoft wants enterprises to closely watch the agents that employees use with systems not controlled by AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
How to continue a GitHub Copilot app session in VS Code
Learn how to move an agent session from the GitHub Copilot app into VS Code without losing the conversation, code changes, or working context. The post How to continue a GitHub Copilot app session in VS Code appeared first on The GitHub Blog .
The Next Wave: Are layoffs good for AI’s business?
Cet article est aussi disponible en français First published on October 18, 2026 Microsoft ADC offices at Dunhill Towers in Nairobi, Kenya. Image: TechCabal Microsoft has shut its Africa Development Centre (ADC) in Nairobi, Kenya, leaving more than 400 engineers without jobs, following the closure of its Lagos engineering operation in May 2024. It has […]
The neocloud shakeout is coming, and Nvidia has the most to lose
After stock crashes and Firmus's scrapped IPO, industry executives expect only seven to ten of the hundreds of AI cloud providers to survive. CoreWeave lost a quarter of its market value, and Microsoft pulled out of a deal with Nscale for 23,000 Nvidia chips. Nvidia has a lot riding on the outcome, since customers outside the hyperscalers make up 45 percent of its data center revenue. The article The neocloud shakeout is coming, and Nvidia has the most to lose appeared first on The Decoder .
How the Xbox’s Disc-to-Digital Program Works
Microsoft is letting players digitize their game discs for free, but don't sell your physical collection just yet.
Microsoft's ex-VP of HR shares 3 effective ways to use AI at work — and what he never uses it for
As more companies require the use of AI tools in the workplace, Leadership advisor Chris Williams shares the best ways to add it to your workflow.
Microsoft pulls out of AI datacentre project in Essex over power supply concerns
Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies. The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year. Continue reading...
RTX Spark Ignites Global Celebration as New Windows PCs Arrive
NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops are now available, bringing NVIDIA Blackwell RTX graphics, up to 128GB of unified memory and the full NVIDIA AI platform to slim, premium Windows PCs. Starting at $2,399, laptops from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI bring powerful local AI, content creation and gaming capabilities to a portable device, with […]
Microsoft Pitches AI for Africa’s Oil, Gas and Mining Operations at African Energy Week
Microsoft set out its plan to speed AI adoption across Africa’s oil, gas, utilities and mining sectors at African Energy Week 2026 on Oct. 12. Predictive maintenance was at the centre of the pitch. The approach links companies’ enterprise data with their industrial operational technology systems. Microsoft’s examples were predictive maintenance and asset optimisation, such [...]
Microsoft reveals cutting-edge MAI-Base-2 model with 2T parameters
Microsoft Corp. has developed a new large language model that it says is significantly more efficient than leading open-source alternatives. The company’s artificial intelligence research group detailed the algorithm on Thursday. MAI-Base-2 is not a full-fledged LLM but rather a base model, a kind of no-frills prototype. Developers turn base models into LLMs by putting […] The post Microsoft reveals cutting-edge MAI-Base-2 model with 2T parameters appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
The technology maturity paradox: Why more capabilities can make IT harder
Technology maturity is generally considered a sign of progress. Organizations modernize their infrastructure and capabilities, introduce advanced analytics, and invest in AI, all with the expectation that these improvements will make the business more capable, efficient, and competitive. But there’s a paradox emerging in enterprise IT: The more sophisticated an organization’s technology environment becomes, the more difficult it can be to manage. Every new capability may expand what the business can accomplish while also increasing the number of dependencies, decisions, and stakeholders that must be coordinated. At this rate, technological progress can outpace the organization’s ability to manage it. As technology portfolios expand, so do the dependencies that IT leaders must understand and coordinate. Recent SoftwareOne research illustrates the disconnect. Although 86% of respondents to a recent survey described their organizations as established, advanced, or highly advanced in their transformation efforts, 41% still identified legacy systems and technical debt as a leading obstacle to execution. Clearly, investing in more advanced technology doesn’t automatically eliminate the challenges that make transformation difficult. Understand when IT modernization adds complexity Consider an organization that has invested heavily in Microsoft’s technology ecosystem. Azure supports its cloud infrastructure, Fabric brings together data capabilities, Power BI provides analytics, and…
Why technology is no longer IT’s scarcest resource
For much of the history of enterprise IT, technology itself was a limiting factor. Organizations had to make difficult choices about which systems they could afford and which capabilities were realistic to deploy. Technology leaders built their strategies around those constraints. Today, the challenge looks different. Cloud platforms, advanced analytics, automation, and AI have made sophisticated capabilities accessible to organizations of nearly every size. Microsoft’s expanding portfolio, from Azure and Fabric to Power Platform and Copilot, illustrates just how quickly the range of available options has grown. But greater access to technology has made the job of the tech leader more complicated. The scarcest resources in IT today are the attention, organizational context, and judgment required to distinguish meaningful opportunities from distractions. The CIO’s challenge is no longer simply understanding what technology can do, but determining what deserves the organization’s finite capacity to act. Evaluate new capabilities: When opportunity becomes a distraction Every new capability creates another potential investment decision. AI offers opportunities to improve productivity and automate workflows. Data platforms promise better insights. Cloud modernization can improve scalability and flexibility. Each opportunity may have merit, but pursuing too many simultaneously can stretch resources, introduce complexity, and distract from more pressing business needs. The temptati…
Factory's Droid Now Takes Coding Tasks Directly From Slack and Jira
Factory makes Delegations generally available, letting teams hand coding tasks to its Droid agent directly from Slack, Linear, Jira, and Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra Review: The First Real AI PC
The Surface Laptop Ultra is a true MacBook Pro competitor for Windows, and Microsoft has never been so close to dethroning Apple—if only it weren't for the lack of battery life.
AI infrastructure debt costs soar amid investor concerns
Oracle’s $160 billion debt is rated just above junk status, and Microsoft’s AAA-rated debt costs 25% more to insure than three months ago.
Microsoft president warns Trump's immigration crackdown could drive top AI talent abroad
Brad Smith also defended Microsoft against JD Vance's claim that the company replaced laid-off Americans with foreign workers.
Microsoft’s Nairobi Africa Development Centre Reportedly Closing Its Engineering Operations
Microsoft’s Africa Development Centre in Nairobi is reportedly closing its engineering operations. Employees were informed of the decision on Monday, Oct. 12, 2026. CIO Africa first reported the closure, citing an employee source. Microsoft has acknowledged that its global restructuring has affected its engineering department in Kenya. It has not confirmed that the entire Nairobi [...]
The $690 billion cloud spending spree
Every quarter, I look at the capital expenditure numbers coming out of the major cloud providers, and every quarter, they manage to surprise me. This time, though, we’ve crossed into territory that’s genuinely hard to process. The five biggest US cloud and AI infrastructure providers (Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle) have collectively committed to spending between $660 billion and $690 billion on capex in 2026 , nearly doubling what they spent just a year ago. Amazon leads the pack with a projected $200 billion, most of it directed at data centers and AI compute. Alphabet has committed $175 to $185 billion, up from $91 billion in 2025. Microsoft is tracking toward $120 billion or more, having already spent $37.5 billion in a single quarter. Meta is at $115 to $135 billion, and Oracle is targeting roughly $50 billion. For context, four companies alone plan to invest about $630 billion, a 62% increase from the record $388 billion they spent in 2025. What are they buying? Mostly chips, buildings, and electricity. The spending splits across the AI data center stack: GPUs and custom accelerators such as Google’s Tensor Processing Units and Amazon’s Trainium, the physical data centers themselves with their liquid cooling and high-density floors, and often the power infrastructure to run it all, including power purchase agreements and even on-site gas-fired generation where the grid can’t keep up. Roughly two-thirds of the money goes to compute, and one-third goes to…
Cyberattack AIs must be trained only on air-gapped systems, hundreds of AI researchers say
Current security procedures for training AI models are inadequate, hundreds of AI researchers have warned governments and the AI community. They are calling for tougher rules and the establishment of a new international body overseeing best practice for AI development. In an open letter the AI specialists — 487, at time of publication, including many senior academics — called for more AI safety research and greater emphasis on containment technologies. “Strong sandboxing mechanisms including air-gapping (disconnecting from the internet) should be used to provide high-assurance containment of cyber-capable AI models,” say the signatories, who include such luminaries as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. The experts said that a new international body, to be set up in consultation with governments and a wide range of AI and security specialists, could set new safety standards but also act as an organization to which containment failures could be reported, improving transparency for learning and accountability purposes. The scientists’ demands go further than some recent calls for greater regulation of AI. Earlier this week, Microsoft president Brad Smith said AI is less regulated than washing machines or milk, although he made no firm proposals to rectify the situation. And the UK parliament is looking at ways to improve AI security , although any moves will be hampered by disagreement among AI businesses. Hinton and Bengio are no strangers to this kind of scientist-led initiat…