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May 21, 2024, 11:55 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 …
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
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
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
Bloomberg:
Sources: Snowflake's talks to acquire Reka AI, which builds LLMs for businesses, for more than $1B have broken down  —  Snowflake Inc.'s talks to acquire startup Reka AI for more than $1 billion have broken down, dashing an effort by the software company to bring more generative AI muscle in-house.

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From Mediagazer

Amy Hawkins / The Guardian:
China sentences journalist Dong Yuyu, an ex-Nieman Fellow whose work has appeared in Chinese editions of the NYT and FT, to seven years in prison for espionage

Scott Jennings / @scottjenningsky:
Conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings says he is joining the LA Times editorial board, as owner Patrick Soon-Shiong works to add “balance” to the board

Bron Maher / Press Gazette:
Publishers at The Guardian, The Boston Globe, and other outlets report more referral traffic from Bluesky than from X despite fewer followers on the former

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
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
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
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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