Microsoft is debuting a new category of Windows PCs optimized for artificial intelligence. Called Copilot+ PCs, the tech giant is initially introducing it on Surface devices and through OEMs Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung. Availability begins June 18, with pre-orders starting now at prices of $999 and up. Microsoft says the new architeccture powers “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built,” with silicon capable of 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second) as well as “all–day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models.” The company describes this new wave of PCs as “just the beginning.” Continue reading Microsoft Pivots Windows to AI OS, Launching Copilot+ PCs

France has been pursuing Big Tech and Microsoft and Amazon are among the first to express interest. Microsoft has committed $4.3 billion to expand cloud and AI infrastructure there, sharing plans to bring as many as 25,000 advanced GPUs to France by the close of 2025. The software giant will also train one million people for AI and data jobs while supporting 2,500 AI startups over the next three years. Meanwhile, Amazon announced that it would invest up to $1.3 billion to expand its existing footprint of 35 logistics facilities in the country. The deals were announced Monday during the Choose France summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron. Continue reading Microsoft, Amazon Commit to Expanding Operations in France

Microsoft revenue was $61.9 billion in the quarter ending March 31, up 17 percent compared to the same period a year ago. Profit was up 20 percent, to $21.9 billion, despite an increase in capital expenditure to purchase Nvidia GPUs for training and running AI models. The performance smashed analyst predictions, sending the stock up 5 percent in after-hours trading. Revenue for the Microsoft Cloud division overall was $35.1 billion, up 23 percent year-over-year, fueled largely by customers using it to host resource intensive AI services. Revenue in the Intelligent Cloud sector was $26.7 billion, a 21 percent uptick. Continue reading Microsoft Cloud Buoys Quarterly Revenue to Nearly $62 Billion

Microsoft, which has been developing small language models (SLMs) for some time, has announced its most-capable SLM family, Phi-3. SLMs can accomplish some of the same functions as LLMs, but are smaller and trained on less data. That smaller footprint makes them well suited to run in a local environment, which means they’re ideal for smartphones, where in theory they would not even need an Internet connection to run. Microsoft claims the Phi-3 open models can outperform “models of the same size and next size up across a variety of benchmarks that evaluate language, coding and math capabilities.” Continue reading Microsoft Small Language Models Are Ideal for Smartphones

Paris-based startup Mistral AI has made an immediate splash in the world of artificial intelligence, securing partnerships with IBM, Microsoft and others nine months after its launch. The company is offering natural language processing models, including its flagship Mistral Large, which becomes only the second LLM (after OpenAI) to land a commercial berth on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, where Meta Platforms’ Llama 2 is available in preview. Boasting “top-tier reasoning capacities” and sophisticated conversational capabilities, Mistral Large specializes in “reasoning, analysis and generation (RAG), is multilingual and supports up to 32,000 tokens.” Continue reading France’s Mistral AI Makes Its Global Debut on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft profits were up 33 percent year-over-year to $21.9 billion in the quarter ending December 31, its fiscal Q2 for 2024. The quarterly growth was the company’s strongest in more than two years. Executives credited it to excitement about artificial intelligence services and the resulting demand for cloud services including Microsoft Azure. Earlier this month, Microsoft achieved a $2.89 trillion market valuation, overtaking Apple as the world’s most valuable public company, and this week it surged past $3 trillion. Revenue was $62 billion for the quarter, up 18 percent. Continue reading Microsoft Q2 Profits Surge 33 Percent Driven by AI and Cloud

Microsoft has added the Mesh mixed reality platform to its Teams remote collaboration app, making 3D and VR meetings now generally available to desktop Windows users and those with Meta Quest headsets. The immersive 3D meeting environments feature spatial audio as well as “live reactions” and the other standard Mesh features will be available to those with Microsoft Teams business accounts. Custom immersive spaces are also available to those with Teams Premium licenses. Microsoft says “hundreds of millions” of people worldwide are currently using Teams, although Mesh for Teams has only been in public preview since late 2022. Continue reading Microsoft Adds Mesh to Enable 3D and VR Meetings in Teams

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is launching a pilot program to create the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a shared U.S. AI research infrastructure. The move fulfills part of President Biden’s October executive order on the responsible development of artificial intelligence. Ten other federal agencies have joined the NSF in launching the program, while tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Google have already pledged their support, along with more than 20 other private organizations across the industry, academic and non-profit sectors. The idea is to create shared access to information and things like cloud computing resources. Continue reading Big Tech Onboard to Advance President Biden’s NSF AI Pilot

Microsoft has expanded its Models as a Service (MaaS) catalog for Azure AI Studio, building beyond the 40 models announced at the Microsoft Ignite event last month with the addition of the Llama 2 code generation model from Meta Platforms in public preview. In addition, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision has been added to accelerate generative AI and multimodal application development. Similar to things like Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), MaaS lets customers use AI models on-demand over the web with easy setup and technical support. Continue reading Microsoft Brings Meta’s Llama 2 to Azure Models as a Service

Nvidia logged another record quarter, with Q3 revenue of $18.12 billion, up 206 percent from a year ago and a 34 percent increase from Q2 that exceeded both its own and analyst projections. The surge, attributed to increasing demand for the chips that drive artificial intelligence, logged primarily under Nvidia’s data center results a record $14.51 billion, up 279 percent from the prior year and 41 percent from Q2. Profits swelled to $9.2 billion, a stunning 1,259 percent increase from 2022’s $680 million. The results for Nvidia’s Q3 were for the three-month period ending October 31. Continue reading Nvidia Sales Surge as Rivals Circle and China Sanctions Loom

Microsoft Ignite 2023 was all about the transformative change of artificial intelligence, and the event was the setting for Bing Chat’s debut as Bing Copilot. The company also introduced three additional Copilot offerings: Copilot for Azure, Copilot for Service and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides. The new Copilot Studio gained tools for connecting Copilots in Microsoft 365 apps — including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the Edge browser and Windows — to third-party data. In addition, the company showcased software for client-configured chatbots, and introduced its first custom designed AI processor, the Maia 100 chip. Continue reading Microsoft Rebrands Bing as Copilot, Debuts First Custom AI

Microsoft has launched Radius, a language-agnostic collaboration app for creating and running cloud-native applications. Radius sprang from the Microsoft Azure Incubations team, whose projects include the development app Dapr, event-driven autoscaling solution KEDA, and the Copacetic security tool. Dapr and KEDA are among the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects. Microsoft submitted Copacetic to CNCF and plans to submit Radius, which standardizes deployment and automates resource provisioning through features like Recipes and Connections. Continue reading Microsoft’s Radius App is Open Source and Cloud Agnostic

Microsoft Cloud drove record sales and profits for Q2, which saw a year-over-year revenue gain of 8 percent to $56.2 billion for April through June. Net income topped $20 billion, a 20 percent gain that beat analyst expectations and the company’s own estimates. Microsoft Cloud revenue for Q2 was up 21 percent, to $30.3 billion. And the company is beginning to see the results of its investments in artificial intelligence. Q2 is Microsoft’s second record-setting quarter this year, topping the three-month high of $52.9 billion in Q1. The previous profit record was $18.8 billion in Q4 2021. Continue reading Microsoft Q2 Marks a Quarterly Sales Record of $56.2 Billion

Microsoft is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a business-focused version of Bing Chat with data privacy and governance controls. The company is also introducing Visual Search in Bing Chat and new AI features for Azure, revealed at its Inspire 2023 conference this week. In addition, the cloud-based Copilot plan “combines the power of large language models with your data in the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps” for a new way of working using only natural language prompts. Currently in early access, Copilot will be priced at $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium subscribers. Continue reading Microsoft Intros Bing Chat Enterprise, New AI Tools for Azure

This week, Meta Platforms released Llama 2, the next generation of its open-source large language model that is free for research and commercial use. Llama 2’s pretrained and fine-tuned language models are available in sizes ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Meta also named Microsoft Azure its “preferred partner for Llama 2,” offering it through the Azure AI model catalog for use with cloud-native tools that leverage content filtering and safety features. Meta says Llama 2 is “also optimized to run locally on Windows,” providing developers a seamless workflow across enterprise and consumer platforms. Continue reading Meta Unveils Llama 2 LLM with Microsoft as Preferred Partner