Microsoft
Microsoft has benefited substantially from the rise of AI. Its partnership and close relationship with OpenAI has continued through 2024, as it looks to establish its Copilot chatbot as a go-to tool across its software and hardware offerings, even dedicating a button to it on future Windows device keyboards. TechCrunch covers those developments, and its other recent moves like unbundling Teams and Office and successfully defeating an antitrust challenge against its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
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Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake
Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.
The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.
Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…
Microsoft will launch its own mobile game store in July, the company announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. Xbox president Sarah Bond shared that the company plans to…
Microsoft and OpenAI have announced a $2 million fund to combat the growing risks of AI and deepfakes being used to “deceive the voters and undermine democracy.” This year will…
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Cloud revenue accelerates 21% to $76 billion for the latest earnings cycle
The numbers are in, and the cloud infrastructure market grew at a brisk pace this quarter driven by increasing interest in generative AI.
Microsoft has reaffirmed its ban on U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition through Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI tech. Language…
Microsoft, it seems, is hedging its bets when it comes to general-purpose robotics AI. At the end of February, the Windows maker spearheaded a massive $675 million Series B in…
The UK is launching initial enquiries into Amazon and Microsoft over partnerships with AI companies Mistral, Anthropic, and Inflection.
CISA said the latest theft of government email — blamed on Russian government hackers — presents “a grave and unacceptable risk” to U.S. federal agencies.
Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is not yet settled.
The tech giant secured a cloud storage server that was inadvertently spilling Microsoft internal data and credentials to the open internet.
The tech world is incredibly focused on AI and its applications today, but artificial intelligence is hardly the only place where progress is being made. If you want to get…
Microsoft AI gets a new London hub fronted by former Inflection and DeepMind scientist Jordan Hoffmann
Microsoft has announced a new London hub for its recently unveiled consumer AI division. It will be fronted by Jordan Hoffmann, an AI scientist and engineer Microsoft recently picked up from…
Microsoft and Quantinuum today announced a major breakthrough in quantum error correction. Using Quantinuum’s ion-trap hardware and Microsoft’s new qubit-virtualization system, the team was able to run more than 14,000…
One of the primary reasons that Slack joined forces with Salesforce in 2021 in a $28 billion deal was to give the communications company the clout to compete with Microsoft.…
The current AI wave is a never-ending barrage of news items. To understand what I mean, ask yourself how long you spent considering the fact that Amazon put another $2.75…
Microsoft has introduced new versions of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription services that exclude its business collaboration chat offering Teams following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints…
AWS and Google Cloud rarely back an open source fork together.
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The market is forcing cloud vendors to relax data egress fees
As a number of factors come into play, like the reality of a multi-cloud world and a stricter regulatory environment, companies are beginning to see the error in their ways.
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Apple dismisses Microsoft monopoly comparisons
A week after finding itself at the business end of a landmark lawsuit from the United States Department of Justice, Apple is staunchly denying any parallels between itself and Microsoft in the 1990s. It’s a comparison into which the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland leaned heavily in last week’s filing.…
Two weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was getting into games, helping users “deepen relationships” through puzzle-based interactions. And on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that the Microsoft-owned social network…
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Helloooo,…
Here’s how Microsoft is providing a ‘good outcome’ for Inflection AI VCs, as Reid Hoffman promised
Exactly how much Microsoft is paying all the investors of Inflection AI as part its oddly structured deal to abscond with the co-founders, much of the staff and the rights…
Microsoft’s latest gambit to snag much of the human talent from Inflection AI is causing waves this week. Redmond has previously invested in the company, but is now absorbing much…
We’re still a month or so out from Build, but Microsoft is doing a bit of a trial run this week in the form of an online-only event. What’s been…
Microsoft announced two new Surface devices and a slew of new accessories at a virtual event today, but the first part of the presentation focused squarely on how its AI…
Microsoft has long garnered plaudits for its focus on accessibility. It’s a large segment of the population that is too often disregarded as an afterthought when it comes to product…
In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less than a year later, Microsoft…
Microsoft has hired Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, co-founders of high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, and several of their colleagues in one of the strangest deals as the Satya Nadella-led cloud…
