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Top 25 Microsoft Articles on Substack

Latest Microsoft Articles


May 13

Nintendo, Microsoft, Square welcome us to the era of fewer big video games

Data shows that Nintendo was ahead of the curve on this one.
Like big-budget video games? Hope you like waiting for them. (And hope there are enough developers left in this industry to make them.) There are abundant signs that we have entered an era that will see fewer major new video games from big game publishers.
Stephen Totilo ∙ 34 LIKES

Microsoft and OpenAI’s increasingly complicated relationship

An AI Soap Opera in the making?
You might think that Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI. But as far as I understand it doesn’t. It has a right to about 49% of a for-profit subsidiary of OpenAI’s profits, up until a very complex point that may require litigation to resolve, but the for-profit hasn’t made any profits, and the for-profit is owned by a non-profit. And I’ll be damned if I can ac…
Gary Marcus ∙ 63 LIKES
Gerben Wierda
Is "it's complicated" a civilised way to say 'clusterfuck'? Or might all of thus mean that OpenAI has handed Microsoft the means to fill whatever mini-'moat' OpenAI had? Did OpenAI give away whatever crown jewels they had in that Microsoft deal that got them the compute they needed? Definitely intriguing.
Ko
Relation"shop" haha is that deliberate?

May 8, 2024

Today, in Racine, Wisconsin, President Joe Biden announced that Microsoft is investing $3.3 billion dollars to build a new data center that will help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world. It is expected to create 2,300 union construction jobs and employ 2,000 permanent workers.
Heather Cox Richardson ∙ 3334 LIKES
JustRaven
“We’re the United States of America,” President Biden said today, “And there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we work together.”
As Joyce Vance says, "We're in this together."
Suzette Ciancio
Thank you, Heather!
“Political philosophers studying the rise of authoritarianism note that strongmen rise by appealing to a population that has been dispossessed economically or otherwise. By bringing jobs back to those regions that have lost them over the past several decades and promising “the great comeback story all across…the entire country,” as he did today, Biden is striking at that sense of alienation.”
Let that continue!

OpenAI Wants To Get Big Fast, And Four More Takeaways From a Wild Week in AI News

Ignore the flirty bot, OpenAI’s big strategic play became clearer this week.
In a season of big AI news, few weeks have felt more significant than this one. OpenAI introduced its new GPT-4o model, Google unveiled a deeper AI vision, and Apple dropped more hints ahead of a massive AI-themed WWDC event. At Big Technology, we also hosted our first public event with Box CEO Aaron Levie, well-timed with the AI news. Our live podcast s…
Alex Kantrowitz ∙ 39 LIKES
Afonso Salcedo (Fonzie)
I’m personally really excited to see where this potential OpenAI/Apple partnership will lead us.
D R
I wouldn’t read too much into Satya Nadella not appearing at the OpenAI event. Sam Altman didn’t appear either so this was positioned as a smaller event than the DevDay one. Also, with Mustafa Suleyman being hired to lead the consumer-focused Microsoft AI unit, I suspect we will see him more at OpenAI stuff. Completely agree it was a big week for GenAI and Microsoft Build is on the 21st so more to come.

OpenAI fluffs its lines as model collapse makes a mockery of its flagship

Leadership in AI is back up for grabs as Chat GPT-4o fails to advance, sending Microsoft, Google, and Apple, scrambling to gain ground...
Before I get to the big news of the day out of OpenAI, I have a favour to ask. I publish most of my insights for free, because I believe the facts in them are important enough to need as large an audience as possible, but my work isn’t free. Future Media is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free…
Ricky Sutton ∙ 3 LIKES

AI has become Sauron’s Ring

Another of AI’s bitter lessons
The other big recent news, aside from Sam nonconsensually making a Scarlett Johansson-like character, even after #ScarlettSaidNo, was that Satya unveiled an Orwellian new Microsoft feature called Recall that will (not making this up) take and record locally screenshots of everything you do. (“F^ck that. I don’t want my computer to spy on everything I do…
Gary Marcus ∙ 128 LIKES
Diego Pineda
In 2010, the best engineers in the world focused on getting more likes and get kids addicted to social media.
Today, AI engineers are focused on replacing human creativity and setting the foundation for surveillance.
🤮
Eric Platt
I like the double entendre of "nonconsensually". :)
Yes, they want "more, more, more"... until they own it all. The old dynamic of the Buddhist "hungry ghost" figure, with the tiny mouth and big belly. It's never enough.

Tech giants' self-made AI energy crisis

For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity. Now the grid they've helped gut cannot possibly supply their growing AI needs.
For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity, falsely claiming they can be replaced by solar/wind. Now the grid they've helped gut can't supply their growing AI needs. For the last decade, tech giants
Alex Epstein ∙ 125 LIKES
BD
These jerks will never come clean with the damage they have done.
TMacro06
Lest us not forget was and still about $$$. Blackrock loves ESG because...if you take to like-for-like portfolios but labeled one "ESG" you can charge up to 50% higher fees just to hold that same money. Sadly, the real goal is more like a watermelon - all "green" on the outside, but "red, Communists red" on the inside. Don't be fooled about the real endgame is for them.

☕️ STORMY WEATHER ☙ Saturday, May 18, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

2024 is shattering weather records, both on Earth and in Space - why?; another barge-bridge meetup; unexpected pardon for justice seekers; China makes sanctions moves; Congress reigns in FAA; more.
Jeff Childers ∙ 948 LIKES
Tom Haviland
The only problem with the law that Congress just passed telling the FAA that none of us are required to wear a mask or get the jab in order to fly on an airplane is that the law is SPECIFIC to COVID-19 ONLY! If the Bird Flu or "Disease X" strikes next, I can see the tyrants requiring us wear masks and get jabs again in order to fly.
Janice - Words Beyond Me
Surely wait in silence for God, O my soul,
For my hope is from Him.
Surely He is my rock and my salvation,
My stronghold; I shall not be shaken.
On God my salvation and my glory rest;
The rock of my strength, my refuge is in God.
Trust in Him at all times, O people;
Pour out your heart before Him;
God is a refuge for us. Selah.
— Psalm 62:5-8 LSB

Biden Up In New WI Poll, "Great American Comeback Story," Careful W/Polling Averages

Our Next Hopium-Wide Gathering Is May 22nd - Register Today!
Happy Thursday all. Sorry I’m a little late today. I am traveling and my plane’s WiFi was out for a while. Let’s get to it: Biden Announces Huge New Tech Investment in Wisconsin, New Poll Has Him Up 6 In This Critical Battleground - Here’s Heather Cox Richardson
Simon Rosenberg ∙ 296 LIKES
Janie Frank
Start my day with Hopium before I go to write postcards and run my postcarding hub. Thank you for the always brilliant interpretation and consolidation of relevant FACTS.
Cathy Murphree
There’s a little piece of me that wonders if the recent judicial system failures to hold Trump accountable in a timely and competent manner (e.g., Aileen Cannon) is resulting in more voters paying attention and realizing it really is going to be up to them to stop Trump.

0 To $100 Million In 9 Months 🚀, AI for social good🌍, Governments are the biggest source of VC funds🏛️

Welcome to The VC Corner, your weekly dose of Venture Capital and Startups to keep you up and running! 🚀 Thanks to your support, we’ve reached 26,000 subscribers in the 6 first months of The VC Corner, and we're just getting started 🎉 To celebrate, we're offering the first 100 users who redeem the offer a 20% lifetime discount to become a premium subscr…
Ruben Dominguez Ibar ∙ 15 LIKES
Burak Buyukdemir
great weekend read


OpenAI's GPT-4o and Partnership with Apple 🍎

Mira Murati was magical, not sure about all of these accessibility upgrades.
Audio Introduction 🎧 0:54 Hello Everyone, OpenAI had a Spring Update event the day before Google I/O begins, today as I write this on May 13th, 2024. It comes at an awkward time for Google, that lost market share as Apple’s talks with OpenAI have gone well to bring GPT-4o’s Voice to presumably, the upcoming iOS 18 and iPhones of 2025.
Michael Spencer ∙ 45 LIKES
Riley Tom
Definitely waiting for Siris new update, as well as integration into some big time video games and VR software. Then this takes off to a new level, albeit more niche than these general purpose model, but way more immersive
Oguz Erkan
That’s a very comprehensive take on the Michael. As you said I am not sure whether OpenAI will get the voice assistant right but I am satisfied for one reason: Ability to solve easy math problems.
This is significant because basically what differs AGI from the current models is next-token-prediction.
Current models lack this, if the question wasn’t included in their training data they simply can’t solve it. I am not telling it can’t provide an answer, it will and these answers will sometimes be true, but it won’t get that answer by applying logic predicting the outcome.
The questions illustrated were too basic so they could already be included in the training data. But if they were not included in the data as a block and the mode can solve a basic math problem like 1+2+7+3+5+12+33+17=? then AGI is basically just building on this.

☁️ Amazon: Wild Margin Expansion

AI requires billions in Capex but it looks like money well spent
Welcome to the Friday edition of How They Make Money. Over 100,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 🚖 Tesla: Robotaxi Pivot ♾ Meta: The Anti-Apple 🔎 Google: "A Positive Moment" 🍿 Netflix: Engagement Machine
App Economy Insights ∙ 59 LIKES



A Catalog of Wonderful Companies: State of the Project

Over the years, I've evaluated companies, one by one, every week, to determine their potential for long-term investment. Here's the current lineup of companies that I deem exceptional.
A truly great business must have an enduring “moat” that protects excellent returns on invested capital. The dynamics of capitalism guarantee that competitors will repeated…
Value Stock Geek ∙ 28 LIKES

Does AI have a gross margin problem?

Can AI overcome the gross margin doubters?
Financial operations are needlessly complex. You have to cobble together a patchwork of tools that aren’t integrated with each other, cost you time, and lead to errors. Mercury simplifies this with banking* and software that powers all your critical
CJ Gustafson ∙ 22 LIKES
Francesca Krihely
Great overview CJ. I do think the gross margins will grow over time with optimizations but I think competition amongst these vendors will require them to make big investments outside of R&D to keep up. So as Moore’s law reduces the COGS there might be less differentiation requiring each to put more cash into S & M spend. I don’t know if that will be at the same scale as the R&D costs.
Dartz
Looks like we have two competing forces. Moore's law says the cost of computing will go down (# of transistors double, computing power doubles). That can also apply to power usage dropping per MIPS. On the other side we have demand increasing, being users demanding more complex requests and operations, which require more MIPS. The gross profit is where the race is measured.
The other race is how you charge a customer. What business model works and both takes market shared and improves gross profit?

What happens when an app goes down? All about outages

Death, taxes, and outages: why being a software engineer isn't always so cushy.
A wise engineer once said that only 3 things are for sure: death, taxes, and outages. And when an app goes down, it’s a colloquial Titanic event for a company – all hands on deck, engineers getting paged at odd hours of the night, and frantic Slack Huddles until they find the culprit (it’s usually DNS). But what exactly
Justin ∙ 39 LIKES
Drew Meister
Such a fun read. My app went down from a memory leak and a database migration. Watching its last attempts at recovering, flagging errors everywhere, trying to restart itself, was a wild ride. It was beautiful in a way.

Your privacy is important to us

so we told everyone about your embarrassing medical conditions!
Hi there, situation normies! And also, aloha, situation normies! I wasn’t sure how last week’s story about looking for a late night dinner in San Rafael was going to play. My concern was it might not be relatable— a comedy writer word that means, “will anyone give a rat’s-tuchis about this story?” Turns out, it was relatable! I heard from more than a dozen situation normies who had also been let down by San Rafael’s late night dining options. Based on this statistically insignificant sample size, I can only conclude that San Rafael needs to get its shit together.
Michael Estrin ∙ 56 LIKES
Michael Jensen
Dear MR. ESTRIN, We have obtained information about your uncontrollable farting. Unless you want the entire world to learn about this horrible embarassing information donate $10,000 to the herein-named GoFundMe. Sincerely, Kaiser Per, er, Some Bad Dudes in Gambia.
Jessica Sitton
Have to say that the fourth thing I do now every Sunday morning (after pee, Wordle and Connections) is read your latest post.
1. Not sayin’. I told you I have to pee first thing, that’s all you get.
2. This actually came up on a doctors’ chat , low long ago before I retired (!!!!) two weeks ago. At least one other physician also swore by my (and apparently her) mom’s tried and true treatment: drink a glass of water upside down (drink from the opposite side of the glass. This works best when done over a sink, so as not to scare the dog with your antics.)
3. Pick a random yet memorable song and use the first letters of the first line as a password. Throw in random numbers and symbols but forget exactly where they go, so write it all down in a notebook and put that in a Safe Place .
4. What was the question?
5. Trader Joe’s ginger snap.

Extra! Extra! 5/12 🙌🏼

The worm has turned.
Hi, all, and happy Sunday! Happy Mother’s Day, too, to anyone who celebrates it. Here’s your list of fabulous things that happened this week while we weren’t paying attention. There are some really good ones. Take a few minutes away from doomscrolling and luxuriate in the wins!
Jessica Craven ∙ 112 LIKES
Jan M. Flynn
I so appreciate these good news roundups -- they put things in perspective!
Deanna Lewis
Reading your list is a bright spot of my week. Thank you for all you do. Keep on keeping on 😋

Surprising ways to prompt AI 😳

Push AI to be bolder and stranger for creative inspiration
Summary: AI outputs can be disappointingly conventional. To avoid predictable responses, I like instructing AI engines to be strange. Unexpected, radical ideas can be useful for creative inspiration. Odd perspectives stretch my thinking. Read on for specific ways to prompt AI to break beyond its bland boundaries.
Jeremy Caplan ∙ 61 LIKES
John Fogg
Brilliant is good (and the above was), but many times better is USEFUL! Thanks so much Jeremy 🩷
❤️ Jenny Blake
These are so good!! I love every example, and the images. Wonderful to meet you last night, and I’m thankful to now be subscribed! 🙏🥳

Cybersecurity Innovation Pulse #45: 60+ Product Announcements at RSA. AI-Pocalypse. Recentering.

Covering May 2nd - May 11th, 2024
Welcome to Issue 45 of the Cybersecurity Innovation Pulse! I'm Darwin Salazar, Product Manager at Monad and a former Detection Engineer. Each week, I distill the latest and most exciting developments in cybersecurity innovation into digestible, bite-sized updates. If you’re serious about staying at the forefront of the latest in security products and in…
Darwin Salazar

UX careers in climate guide #1: job boards

Get a jorb
Last updated May 20th 2024 Climate careers series introduction 70% of the readers of this newsletter want a climate job . This short series summarizes the research I’m doing while looking for my own role. Job boards! There are several climate-related boards with names like Climatetechjobs.jobbies or GreenJobs.wow — but which ones are worth …
James Christie ∙ 3 LIKES

Last Week in AI #270: DeepMind releases AlphaFold 3, Marines test robot dogs with rifles, DeepSeek-V2, TikTok to label AI-generated content, and more!

AlphaFold 3 can predict DNA/RNA and more, Marine Spec Ops test weaponized quadrupeds from Onyx Industries, DeepSeek-V2 improves LLM efficiency, TikTok will label all AI-made content
Top News Google DeepMind’s new AlphaFold can model a much larger slice of biological life Google's DeepMind has unveiled AlphaFold 3, an advanced version of its protein structure prediction tool, which can now predict the structures of DNA, RNA, and essential drug discovery molecules like ligands. This new tool provides a more detailed and dynamic view of…
Last Week in AI ∙ 7 LIKES

Det. Eng. Weekly #70 - It's hot detection summer

Good vibes and low false positives 🏄‍♂️🏄‍♂️
Welcome to Issue #70 of Detection Engineering Weekly! I’m in the greatest city in the world this week hanging out with the research and detection engineering teams here at Datadog. It’s so cool to see how much this field has grown, and how as an org, we’ve adopted (and led) so many different efforts to bring threat detection into our internal security an…
Zack 'techy' Allen ∙ 2 LIKES