Sam Altman is reportedly considering converting OpenAI into a for-profit benefit corporation, breaking free from the non-profit board's control. The structural overhaul could smooth over governance headaches like last year's boardroom drama, make raising up to $100B far easier, and ultimately pave the way for an IPO.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just addressed the G7 Summit, revealing the company poured $5 billion into cloud and AI infrastructure across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Kenya over the past three months. Teaming up with UAE-based G42, Microsoft is building trusted data zones and driving sustainable data centers to bend the productivity curve in emerging markets.
OpenAI is teaming up with Microsoft and Oracle to run Azure AI workloads on Oracle's cloud infrastructure. The deal shows OpenAI needs more capacity than Microsoft alone can provide to keep ChatGPT running smoothly. Frontier model pre-training stays on Microsoft supercomputers, but the partnership also puts Oracle in the awkward position of supplying both OpenAI and rival xAI.
Intel, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and AMD just formed the UALink Promoter Group to establish an open standard for interconnecting AI accelerator chips in data centers. UALink 1.0 will connect up to 1,024 GPUs in a computing pod. Notably missing are Nvidia and AWS, as tech giants push to break Nvidia's grip on AI hardware.
Microsoft just launched an official Copilot bot inside Telegram, bringing free text chat and web search directly to users on mobile and desktop. It handles quick queries, translations, and coding tasks with a limit of 30 turns per day. The catch: it requires your phone number and can't generate images yet.
The UK data watchdog just launched an inquiry into Microsoft's new Recall feature, which takes screenshots of Copilot+ PC screens every few seconds to build a searchable history. While Microsoft insists all data stays encrypted locally and is strictly opt-in, privacy experts warn that capturing passwords and sensitive records without filtering poses a serious security risk.
Microsoft just added an AI-powered Advanced Paste tool to Windows 11 in PowerToys 0.81. The feature can convert clipboard text on the fly into Markdown, JSON, or plain text, and lets you prompt OpenAI to translate, summarize, or rewrite code across languages. The catch is that you need your own OpenAI API key and paid credits.
Microsoft just announced that Edge will soon translate and dub videos on the fly across sites like YouTube, Coursera, and LinkedIn. The AI feature generates live subtitles and spoken audio as you watch, currently supporting translations between English and Spanish, German, Hindi, Italian, and Russian.
Microsoft just introduced Team Copilot at its Build conference, expanding its generative AI tech from personal assistance to full team collaboration. Embedded across Teams, Loop, and Planner, it can take shared meeting notes, summarize chats, assign tasks, and track deadlines. It launches in preview later this year for Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
GitHub just launched Copilot Extensions, allowing developers to invoke third-party services like Docker, Sentry, and Azure directly inside Copilot Chat using natural language. Organizations can also build private extensions for internal APIs. Why it matters: developers can troubleshoot, manage databases, and deploy without leaving their IDE.
Microsoft just made its lightweight Phi-3 model family available to developers, bringing Phi-3-mini to Azure AI alongside small and medium versions. The company also previewed Phi-3-vision, a 4.2-billion-parameter multimodal model built for chart and image reasoning. Why it matters: Powerful compact models like this pave the way for real-world AI PC deployments.
Microsoft just unveiled Recall for Copilot+ PCs at Build 2024, using AI to fix Windows' notoriously clunky search. Running over 40 local multimodal small models, it lets you search virtually anything you've seen—from past emails to specific meeting slides—using vague contextual clues. Everything runs offline on-device, rolling out on June 18.
OpenAI just stealthily upgraded ChatGPT's web search with the GPT-4o rollout. The free tier now explicitly tells you when it searches the web, lists the exact sites it crawled, and surfaces direct citations instead of hallucinating links.
OpenAI just made data analysis much smoother by letting ChatGPT pull files directly from Google Drive and OneDrive, killing the tedious download-then-upload routine. Powered by GPT-4o, the update rolls out to paid subscribers over the next few weeks alongside interactive, customizable charts.
Microsoft is reportedly developing an in-house AI language model called MAI-1, packing roughly 500 billion parameters. Headed by recently hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, it marks Microsoft's first massive internal frontier model since investing over $10 billion in OpenAI. Owning its own heavyweight model gives the tech giant crucial leverage and a strong hedge against OpenAI.
OpenAI just sparked speculation about a direct challenge to Google after registering the search.chatgpt.com domain. Reports indicate an official announcement could arrive as early as May 9. Rather than relying on clunky Bing add-ons, the new tool aims to deeply integrate real-time web retrieval directly into ChatGPT to rethink the traditional search experience.
Microsoft just updated Azure OpenAI Service terms to explicitly bar U.S. police departments from using its AI models for facial recognition. The new rules also ban law enforcement globally from running real-time facial recognition on body cameras and dashcams, drawing a firm line on biometric surveillance.
Microsoft initially poured $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019 largely because it was worried about falling behind Google's machine learning scale, according to unsealed internal emails. CTO Kevin Scott warned Satya Nadella and Bill Gates that Microsoft took six months just to replicate Google's BERT model due to lagging infrastructure, prompting Nadella to push for the deal.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security just formed a 22-member AI Safety and Security Board, tapping tech leaders like Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, and Sundar Pichai. The panel is tasked with shielding critical infrastructure like power grids and airports from AI-driven threats. Why it matters: As risks range from automated cyberattacks to bioweapons, Washington is asking the builders of AI to help safeguard the nation against it.
A Maryland high school athletic director was just arrested after allegedly using AI to fabricate a racist audio recording of his principal. The deepfaked clip went viral and got the principal suspended, before forensic analysts traced the audio back to AI tools used on the school network. Why it matters: It’s a chilling look at how accessible voice-cloning tech is already being weaponized for personal vendettas.
