If an Iranian taxi driver waves away your payment, saying, “Be my guest this time,” accepting their offer would be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying—probably three times—before they’ll take your money. This dance of refusal and counter-refusal, called taarof, governs countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are… Read More »
On Thursday, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they have signed a non-binding agreement to revise their partnership, marking the latest development in a relationship that has grown increasingly complex as both companies compete for customers in the AI market and seek new partnerships for growing infrastructure needs. “Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of… Read More »
A prominent US senator has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for “gross cybersecurity negligence,” citing the company’s continued use of an obsolete and vulnerable form of encryption that Windows uses by default. In a letter to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) said an investigation his office conducted into… Read More »
Microsoft’s Office 365 suite will soon incorporate AI models from Anthropic alongside existing OpenAI technology, The Information reported, ending years of exclusive reliance on OpenAI for generative AI features across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The shift reportedly follows internal testing that revealed Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model excels at specific Office tasks where OpenAI’s… Read More »
While tech companies market AI as a productivity tool for everyone, a UK government study reveals an unexpected result: Neurodiverse employees may be benefiting far more from chatbots than their neurotypical colleagues. The UK’s Department for Business and Trade recently released evaluation results from its Microsoft 365 Copilot trial showing that while overall satisfaction was… Read More »
On Wednesday, Microsoft released the complete source code for Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Version 1.1, the 1978 interpreter that powered the Commodore PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Apple II through custom adaptations. The company posted 6,955 lines of assembly language code to GitHub under an MIT license, allowing anyone to freely use, modify, and distribute… Read More »
Knowledge emerges from understanding how ideas relate to each other. LLMs operate on these contextual relationships, linking concepts in potentially novel ways—what you might call a type of non-human “reasoning” through pattern recognition. Whether the resulting linkages the AI model outputs are useful depends on how you prompt it and whether you can recognize when… Read More »
Still, the coincidence between Altman’s statement and the MIT report reportedly spooked tech stock investors earlier in the week, who have already been watching AI valuations climb to extraordinary heights. Palantir trades at 280 times forward earnings. During the dot-com peak, ratios of 30 to 40 times earnings marked bubble territory. The apparent contradiction in… Read More »
Wyoming’s data center boom Cheyenne is no stranger to data centers, having attracted facilities from Microsoft and Meta since 2012 due to its cool climate and energy access. However, the new project pushes the state into uncharted territory. While Wyoming is the nation’s third-biggest net energy supplier, producing 12 times more total energy than it… Read More »
Stargate moves forward despite early skepticism When OpenAI announced Stargate in January, critics questioned whether the company could deliver on its ambitious $500 billion funding promise. Trump ally and frequent Altman foe Elon Musk wrote on X that “They don’t actually have the money,” claiming that “SoftBank has well under $10B secured.” Tech writer and… Read More »