Aaron Holmes

Staff in Microsoft’s artificial intelligence unit recently finished training a new family of AI models, internally dubbed MAI, that they think can perform nearly as well as leading models from labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, according to a person involved in the effort . The initiative is part of Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s plan to make Microsoft more self-sufficient in AI after

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new generative artificial intelligence model that can be used to generate video game scenes and environments, which change in response to a game player’s actions on their game controller. The model, called Muse, was trained by Microsoft researchers and staff in its Xbox gaming unit using seven years’ worth of gameplay footage from its Xbox game Bleeding Edge.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new quantum computing chip called “Majorana 1” that it said is more reliable than previous quantum computers. The chip reflects a scientific breakthrough in the quantum computing field and could be used to train and run large AI models in “years, not decades,” the company said. The breakthrough underlying Majorana, which was published Wednesday in Nature ,

Databricks has inked a new partnership with SAP in which the German software giant will resell its database software to its corporate customers. The key part of the deal is that Databricks’ database will be able to work with data from SAP applications for the first time. The agreement, which is similar to the one Databricks has with Microsoft, will give the startup access to SAP’s customer

The falling cost of artificial intelligence—underscored by the arrival of DeepSeek—is likely to pressure software firms to stop charging customers for ChatGPT-like features such as summarizing documents and automatically drafting emails, which are fast becoming a commodity, executives from ...

Microsoft said Wednesday its revenue grew 12% in the fourth quarter of 2024 compared to the same period a year earlier—four points slower than its third quarter growth—as growth in its Azure cloud server rentals also slowed for the second consecutive quarter. Still, the company said revenue from artificial intelligence products, including selling access to software from OpenAI and other AI

A UK government watchdog recommended that the nation’s top regulator investigate Microsoft and Amazon on antitrust grounds, according to a report published Tuesday. The report found that Microsoft and Amazon each control about 40% of the country’s cloud computiung market, while Google is the third largest provider with a “much smaller share.” The report, by an independent inquiry group, called

As 2024 was drawing to a close, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman faced two major problems. He wasn’t getting enough server capacity from Microsoft, his company’s biggest backer, to stay ahead of rivals developing artificial intelligence. And he was facing a legal challenge from one of his biggest foes, ...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and President Brad Smith met with president-elect Donald Trump and vice-president elect J.D. Vance at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Wednesday, Microsoft said in a statement. Elon Musk, who has been tapped by Trump to lead a government efficiency initiative and recently sued Microsoft over its deal with OpenAI, also joined the meeting. The Microsoft executives and Trump

In 2021, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella faced a choice involving the company’s Xbox and cloud gaming business. The company could either acquire major game studios to drive more subscriptions to its nascent Game Pass subscription service. Or it could wind down its games business entirely, Nadella ...

Microsoft is reorganizing its cloud and AI teams to form a new “Core AI” unit, which will be tasked with building the AI tools that Microsoft’s developers and cloud customers use to create applications, CEO Satya Nadella said in a note to employees on Monday. The new unit will be led by Jay Parikh, the former Lacework CEO and Meta engineering executive who joined Microsoft last year. Multiple

Top U.S. antitrust regulators on Friday asked a federal judge in California overseeing Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI to decide whether the artificial intelligence developer and its partner Microsoft ran afoul of federal antitrust laws in recent years. The request lends credence to Musk’s claim that Microsoft’s multifaceted partnership with OpenAI deserves antitrust scrutiny because it is

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is expected to fly to the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla.,Thursday to meet with President-elect Donald Trump, according to a person briefed on the plans. The meeting comes as Trump has signaled a desire to crack down on Google and other big tech companies that he has ...

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would appoint Andrew Ferguson as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which has been overseeing antitrust probes or cases involving Meta Platforms, Amazon and Microsoft. Ferguson, one of two Republicans currently serving on the five-person FTC commission, will replace current chair Lina Khan. The move comes as Google has asked the FTC to kill

Google recently asked the U.S. government to break up Microsoft’s exclusive agreement to host OpenAI’s technology on its cloud servers, according to a person who has been directly involved in the effort. The conversation took place after the Federal Trade Commission, one of the primary federal ...

Microsoft has a new pitch to persuade businesses to spend money on artificial intelligence–powered services: If you use them, you won’t need as many employees. The potential of AI to replace human workers is an old idea, but one most companies have avoided bringing up explicitly, for fear of ...

As the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ramps up its sweeping new antitrust investigation into Microsoft, FTC officials have been asking Microsoft's rivals about the impact of its artificial intelligence deals and range of products, according to someone involved in the discussions and a second ...

OpenAI, targeting nearly $4 billion in revenue this year, has generated the vast majority of those sales from individual consumers who pay for ChatGPT’s premium features. The company’s ability to hit its steep growth goals—as much as $100 billion in revenue by 2029—will hinge in part on its ...

As Republicans sweeping to power in Washington call for bringing the great tech powers to heel, one of those big companies has mostly escaped their wrath: Microsoft. Brad Smith, the company’s president and main liaison to Washington, is trying to keep it that way. In the months before Donald ...

Microsoft has struck a deal with HarperCollins to use the publishers’ books to train new artificial intelligence models, Bloomberg first reported on Tuesday. Microsoft is reportedly planning to use nonfiction books to train a new AI model that has not yet been released. The news follows similar deals that AI labs have struck with publishers to use their intellectual property to train models.