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May 21, 2024, 10:30 PM
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Top News

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft will soon let businesses build custom Copilot AI agents to automate tasks, and unveils Team Copilot to help with tasks in Teams, Loop, and Planner  —  Microsoft will soon allow businesses and developers to build AI-powered Copilots that can work like virtual employees and perform tasks automatically.
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Microsoft announces the developer preview of Windows Volumetric Apps, giving access to an API that lets devs put Windows apps in 3D space on Meta Quest headsets  —  You can already beam your flat Windows desktop and its VR games onto your Meta Quest headset — but what if Windows could send HoloLens …
Ken Yeung / VentureBeat:
Microsoft announces the general availability of its Phi-3 models, including Phi-3-Silica, a 3.3B parameter model that will be embedded on all Copilot+ PCs  —  Microsoft is making more investments in the development of small language models.  At its Build developer conference …
Kevin Okemwa / Windows Central:
Microsoft ships Azure AI Studio in broad availability, adds support for OpenAI's GPT-4o, and announces a new multimodal model in its lightweight Phi-3 family  —  Azure AI will now ship with GPT-4o and Microsoft's Phi-3 family of small AI models to help developers build custom Copilot apps responsibly and safely.
Ken Yeung / VentureBeat:
Microsoft partners with Khan Academy, moving the Khanmigo agent, used by 65K+ students, to its Azure OpenAI Service and making it free for US K-12 teachers  —  Microsoft is partnering with Khan Academy in a multifaceted deal to demonstrate how AI can transform the way we learn.
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Microsoft launches Copilot Extension for GitHub, letting developers build third-party skills into Copilot, starting with DataStax, Stripe, MongoDB, and more
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Microsoft debuts a new AI feature for Edge to translate spoken content via dubbing and subtitles live, on YouTube, LinkedIn, Coursera, news sites, and more
Glenn Rifkin / New York Times:
Gordon Bell, who helped design several influential minicomputers at Digital Equipment Corporation, including the 12-bit PDP-8, died on May 17 at age 89  —  It cost $18,000 when it was introduced in 1965, but it bridged the world between room-size mainframes and the modern desktop.
Steven Levy / Wired:
Anthropic researchers detail attempts to peer inside the “black box” of LLMs, learning which combinations of neurons evoke specific concepts  —  What goes on in artificial neural networks work is largely a mystery, even to their creators.  But researchers from Anthropic have caught a glimpse.
Paresh Dave / Wired:
Google plans to test search and shopping ads in its AI Overviews, drawing from advertisers' existing campaigns; AI Overviews rolled out to US users last week  —  Google is set to start mixing ads into its new AI-generated search answers.  It's a test of how the company's biggest revenue stream can adapt to the age of generative AI.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Humane is seeking a buyer for its business, after the rocky launch of its AI pin; a source says the startup is seeking a price of between $750M and $1B  —  - Humane's AI pin was billed as an alternative to smartphones  — AI hardware product received poor reviews after its launch
Bradley Keoun / CoinDesk:
Farcaster, a blockchain-based social media project built on Ethereum, raised $150M in a round led by Paradigm and says it has 350K paid sign-ups  —  Dan Romero's Farcaster made waves earlier this year with the introduction of “Frames,” a feature allowing apps to run within posts, so users don't have to click off to another site.
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Generative AI music startup Suno raised $125M from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Matrix, Founder Collective, and others  —  Suno, a trailblazing music AI startup, announced today that it has raised a staggering $125 million in its latest funding round …
Bloomberg:
Sources: ASML and TSMC have ways to disable their machines if China invades Taiwan; ASML reassured Dutch officials about its ability to remotely disable them  —  - Firms can remotely shut off advanced EUV chip-making machines  — US officials concerned over risk of conflict to chip industry
Christopher Barnard / New York Times:
A look at Paperless Post, a New York-based software company for sending online invitations and events that launched in 2009 and has sent ~650M invitations  —  James Hirschfeld and his sister, Alexa Hirschfeld, at the Paperless Post office in Manhattan's Financial District.Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times
Imran Rahman-Jones / BBC:
The UK ICO is “making enquiries with Microsoft” over the company's Recall feature, which some privacy campaigners have called a potential “privacy nightmare”  —  The UK data watchdog says it is “making enquiries with Microsoft” over a new feature that can take screenshots of your laptop every few seconds.
Kris Holt / Engadget:
Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs as a new class of AI-capable Windows PCs that have at least 40 TOPs of NPU performance, with several OEMs and chipmakers on board  —  The aim is to handle more AI processing locally rather than in the cloud.  —  We've been hearing rumblings for months …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs event was compelling, the culmination of years of work, and Windows feels revitalized while its hardware is meaningfully differentiated
Joyce Lee / Reuters:
Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, IBM, and 10 other companies commit to safe AI development at the AI Seoul Summit 2024, hosted by South Korea and the UK  —  Sixteen companies involved in AI including Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O), Meta (META.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and OpenAI …

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From Mediagazer

Matthew Keys / The Desk:
Prime Video users will be able to watch local PBS stations and PBS Kids for free in coming months, and two new free PBS channels with ads starting November 26

Michael Gold / New York Times:
President-elect Donald Trump announces he has chosen Karoline Leavitt, who served as his campaign's press secretary, to be his White House press secretary

Freedom of the Press Foundation:
Freedom of the Press Foundation launches its own Mastodon server, social.freedom.press, consolidating its accounts, and will still use Threads and Bluesky

More News

Jeff John Roberts / Fortune:
Tech Against Scams, a coalition to fight “pig butchering” ploys with better industry coordination, launches with Meta, Coinbase, Match, Kraken, others on board
Financial Times:
AWS says it has “fully transitioned” from a plan to use Nvidia's Grace Hopper chips, launched in August 2023, in favor of its successor Grace Blackwell
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Adobe adds generative AI tools to Lightroom, including Firefly-powered Generative Remove to let users “paint” over unwanted objects, available in early access
Financial Times:
AI data labeling startup Scale AI raised $1B led by Accel at a ~$14B valuation, up from $7.3B in April 2021; a source says Scale AI had ~$700M in 2023 revenue

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
EU countries vote to approve the landmark EU AI Act, agreed in December 2023, to ensure “trust, transparency, and accountability”, taking effect in June 2024
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple files a lawsuit at the EU's General Court to challenge a March 2024 decision to impose a €1.8B fine for thwarting competition in music streaming
Wired:
How Indian politicians are using deepfakes for voter outreach; an estimated 50M+ AI voice calls were made in the two months before the elections in April 2024
Bloomberg:
OpenAI pulls ChatGPT's Sky voice after users compared the sound to Scarlett Johansson, saying Sky is an actress' voice and wasn't chosen to be an “imitation”
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