Microsoft is currently testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can be used to automate support tasks. From a report: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the software giant has been testing an "embodied AI character" that animates when responding to Xbox support queries. I understand this Xbox AI chatbot is part of a larger effort inside Microsoft to apply AI to its Xbox platform and services.

The Xbox AI chatbot is connected to Microsoft's support documents for the Xbox network and ecosystem, and can respond to questions and even process game refunds from Microsoft's support website. "This agent can help you with your Xbox support questions," reads a description of the Xbox chatbot internally at Microsoft. Microsoft expanded the testing pool for its Xbox chatbot more broadly in recent days, suggesting that this prototype "Xbox Support Virtual Agent" may one day handle support queries for all Xbox customers. Microsoft confirmed the existence of its chatbot to The Verge.

According to a filing with the SEC, OpenAI has removed CEO Sam Altman's ownership and control of the company's venture capital fund that backs AI startups. Reuters reports: The change, documented in the March 29 filing, came after Altman's ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund raised eyebrows for its unusual structure--while being marketed similar to a corporate venture arm, the fund was raised by Altman from outside limited partners and he made investment decisions. OpenAI has said Altman does not have financial interest in the fund despite the ownership.

Axios first reported on the ownership change on Monday. In a statement, a spokesperson for OpenAI said the fund's initial general partner (GP) structure was a temporary arrangement, and "this change provides further clarity." The OpenAI Startup Fund is investing $175 million raised from OpenAI partners such as Microsoft, although OpenAI itself is not an investor. Control of the fund has been moved over to Ian Hathaway, a partner at the fund since 2021, according to the filing. Altman will no longer be a general partner at the fund. OpenAI said Hathaway has overseen the fund's accelerator program and led investments in such companies as Harvey, Cursor and Ambience Healthcare.

The surge of money flooding into AI has resulted in some crypto-like hype that is obscuring the incredible scientific progress in the field, according to Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. From a report: The chief executive of Google's AI research division told the Financial Times that the billions of dollars being poured into generative AI start-ups and products "brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting and some other things that you see in other hyped-up areas, crypto or whatever."

"Some of that has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate. And it clouds the science and the research, which is phenomenal," he added. "In a way, AI's not hyped enough but in some senses it's too hyped. We're talking about all sorts of things that are just not real." The launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022 sparked an investor frenzy as start-ups raced to develop and deploy generative AI and attract venture capital funding. VC groups invested $42.5bn in 2,500 AI start-up equity rounds last year, according to market analysts CB Insights. Public market investors have also rushed into the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia, that are spearheading the AI revolution. Their rise has helped to propel global stock markets to their strongest first-quarter performance in five years.

Microsoft will introduce a new version of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription service that excludes Teams, unbundling a suite following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack. From a report: The move follows Microsoft agreeing to sell Office 365 suite sans Microsoft Teams offering in the EU and Switzerland last year. The company introduced Teams as a complimentary offering to the Office 365 suite in 2017. Microsoft has enjoyed an unfair advantage by coupling the two offerings, many businesses have argued. Slack, owned by Salesforce, termed the move "illegal" alleging that Microsoft forced installation of Teams to customers through its market-dominant productivity suite and hid the true cost of the chat and video service.

"What a time we live in," writes Phoronix, "where Microsoft not only continues contributing significantly to the Linux kernel but doing so to further flesh out the design of the Linux kernel's Rust programming language support..." Microsoft engineer Wedson Almeida Filho has sent out the latest patches working on Allocation APIs for the Rust Linux kernel code and also in leveraging those proposed APIs [as] a means of allowing in-place module initialization for Rust kernel modules. Wedson Almeida Filho has been a longtime Rust for Linux contributor going back to his Google engineering days and at Microsoft the past two years has shown no signs of slowing down on the Rust for Linux activities...

The Rust for Linux kernel effort remains a very vibrant effort with a wide variety of organizations contributing, even Microsoft engineers.

The U.S. House has set a strict ban on congressional staffers' use of Microsoft Copilot, the company's AI-based chatbot, Axios reported Friday. From the report: The House last June restricted staffers' use of ChatGPT, allowing limited use of the paid subscription version while banning the free version. The House's Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor, in guidance to congressional offices obtained by Axios, said Microsoft Copilot is "unauthorized for House use."

"The Microsoft Copilot application has been deemed by the Office of Cybersecurity to be a risk to users due to the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services," it said. The guidance added that Copilot "will be removed from and blocked on all House Windows devices."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NYC's "MyCity" ChatBot was rolled out as a "pilot" program last October. The announcement touted the ChatBot as a way for business owners to "save ... time and money by instantly providing them with actionable and trusted information from more than 2,000 NYC Business web pages and articles on topics such as compliance with codes and regulations, available business incentives, and best practices to avoid violations and fines." But a new report from The Markup and local nonprofit news site The City found the MyCity chatbot giving dangerously wrong information about some pretty basic city policies. To cite just one example, the bot said that NYC buildings "are not required to accept Section 8 vouchers," when an NYC government info page says clearly that Section 8 housing subsidies are one of many lawful sources of income that landlords are required to accept without discrimination. The Markup also received incorrect information in response to chatbot queries regarding worker pay and work hour regulations, as well as industry-specific information like funeral home pricing. Further testing from BlueSky user Kathryn Tewson shows the MyCity chatbot giving some dangerously wrong answers regarding treatment of workplace whistleblowers, as well as some hilariously bad answers regarding the need to pay rent.

MyCity's Microsoft Azure-powered chatbot uses a complex process of statistical associations across millions of tokens to essentially guess at the most likely next word in any given sequence, without any real understanding of the underlying information being conveyed. That can cause problems when a single factual answer to a question might not be reflected precisely in the training data. In fact, The Markup said that at least one of its tests resulted in the correct answer on the same query about accepting Section 8 housing vouchers (even as "ten separate Markup staffers" got the incorrect answer when repeating the same question). The MyCity Chatbot -- which is prominently labeled as a "Beta" product -- does tell users who bother to read the warnings that it "may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content" and that users should "not rely on its responses as a substitute for professional advice." But the page also states front and center that it is "trained to provide you official NYC Business information" and is being sold as a way "to help business owners navigate government." NYC Office of Technology and Innovation Spokesperson Leslie Brown told The Markup that the bot "has already provided thousands of people with timely, accurate answers" and that "we will continue to focus on upgrading this tool so that we can better support small businesses across the city."

According to The Information (paywalled), Microsoft and OpenAI are planning a $100 billion datacenter project that will include an artificial intelligence supercomputer called "Stargate." Reuters reports: The Information reported that Microsoft would likely be responsible for financing the project, which would be 100 times more costly than some of the biggest current data centers, citing people involved in private conversations about the proposal. OpenAI's next major AI upgrade is expected to land by early next year, the report said, adding that Microsoft executives are looking to launch Stargate as soon as 2028. The proposed U.S.-based supercomputer would be the biggest in a series of installations the companies are looking to build over the next six years, the report added.

The Information attributed the tentative cost of $100 billion to a person who spoke to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about it and a person who has viewed some of Microsoft's initial cost estimates. It did not identify those sources. Altman and Microsoft employees have spread supercomputers across five phases, with Stargate as the fifth phase. Microsoft is working on a smaller, fourth-phase supercomputer for OpenAI that it aims to launch around 2026, according to the report. Microsoft and OpenAI are in the middle of the third phase of the five-phase plan, with much of the cost of the next two phases involving procuring the AI chips that are needed, the report said. The proposed efforts could cost in excess of $115 billion, more than three times what Microsoft spent last year on capital expenditures for servers, buildings and other equipment, the report stated.

Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Cloud server provider Vultr has rapidly revised its terms-of-service after netizens raised the alarm over broad clauses that demanded the "perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free" rights to customer "content." The red tape was updated in January, as captured by the Internet Archive, and this month users were asked to agree to the changes by a pop-up that appeared when using their web-based Vultr control panel. That prompted folks to look through the terms, and there they found clauses granting the US outfit a "worldwide license ... to use, reproduce, process, adapt ... modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit, and distribute" user content.

It turned out these demands have been in place since before the January update; customers have only just noticed them now. Given Vultr hosts servers and storage in the cloud for its subscribers, some feared the biz was giving itself way too much ownership over their stuff, all in this age of AI training data being put up for sale by platforms. In response to online outcry, largely stemming from Reddit, Vultr in the past few hours rewrote its ToS to delete those asserted content rights. CEO J.J. Kardwell told The Register earlier today it's a case of standard legal boilerplate being taken out of context. The clauses were supposed to apply to customer forum posts, rather than private server content, and while, yes, the terms make more sense with that in mind, one might argue the legalese was overly broad in any case.

"We do not use user data," Kardwell stressed to us. "We never have, and we never will. We take privacy and security very seriously. It's at the core of what we do globally." [...] According to Kardwell, the content clauses are entirely separate to user data deployed in its cloud, and are more aimed at one's use of the Vultr website, emphasizing the last line of the relevant fine print: "... for purposes of providing the services to you." He also pointed out that the wording has been that way for some time, and added the prompt asking users to agree to an updated ToS was actually spurred by unrelated Microsoft licensing changes. In light of the controversy, Vultr vowed to remove the above section to "simplify and further clarify" its ToS, and has indeed done so. In a separate statement, the biz told The Register the removal will be followed by a full review and update to its terms of service. "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell added. "We're very focused on being responsive to the community and the concerns people have and we believe the strongest thing we can do to demonstrate that there is no bad intent here is to remove it."

Amazon plans to spend almost $150 billion in the coming 15 years on data centers, giving the cloud-computing giant the firepower to handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications and other digital services. From a report: The spending spree is a show of force as the company looks to maintain its grip on the cloud services market, where it holds about twice the share of No. 2 player Microsoft. Sales growth at Amazon Web Services slowed to a record low last year as business customers cut costs and delayed modernization projects. Now spending is starting to pick up again, and Amazon is keen to secure land and electricity for its power-hungry facilities.

"We're expanding capacity quite significantly," said Kevin Miller, an AWS vice president who oversees the company's data centers. "I think that just gives us the ability to get closer to customers." Over the past two years, according to a Bloomberg tally, Amazon has committed to spending $148 billion to build and operate data centers around the world. The company plans to expand existing server farm hubs in northern Virginia and Oregon as well as push into new precincts, including Mississippi, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

Chris Plante reports via Polygon: Phil Spencer doesn't just want Xbox games on other consoles. He wants other video game retailers on Xbox, too. In an interview with Microsoft's CEO of Gaming during the annual Game Developers Conference, Spencer told Polygon about the ways he'd like to break down the walled gardens that have historically limited players to making purchases through the first-party stores tied to each console. Or, in layperson terms, why you should be able to buy games from other stores on Xbox -- not just the official storefront. Spencer mentioned his frustrations with closed ecosystems, so we asked for clarity. Could he really see a future where stores like Itch.io and Epic Games Store existed on Xbox? Was it just a matter of figuring out mountains of paperwork to get there? "Yes," said Spencer. "[Consider] our history as the Windows company. Nobody would blink twice if I said, 'Hey, when you're using a PC, you get to decide the type of experience you have [by picking where to buy games]. There's real value in that." Spencer believes console players would benefit from that freedom too -- and so would console makers like Microsoft.

Spencer explained how, in the past, console makers would typically subsidize the cost of expensive hardware, knowing that a portion of every dollar spent on games for the platform over the years would eventually make it back to the console maker. Then, in time, the console maker would recoup the subsidy -- and hopefully more. But, Spencer said, "Moore's Law has slowed down. The price of the components of a console aren't coming down as fast as they have in previous generations." Worse, he explained, the console market isn't growing, with more gamers moving to PC and handheld options. Now, the notion of subsidizing a console -- and forcing players to purchase games through the official storefront to help recoup costs -- might not make sense. The walls meant to lock people into consoles might be motivating them to stay out.

"[Subsidizing hardware] becomes more challenging in today's world," Spencer said. "And I will say, and this may seem too altruistic, I don't know that it's growing the industry. So I think, what are the barriers? What are the things that create friction in today's world for creators and players? And how can we be part of opening up that model?" The answer, in part, is scrapping exclusivity on more and more Xbox games. Spencer explained that the game experience is hindered when it matters what consoles we play on or what shops sell us our games. As an example, he pointed to Sea of Thieves. A player, he explained, shouldn't have to worry about what hardware they or their friends own. They should just know if their friends have and want to play Sea of Thieves. Now, Spencer said, "if I want to play on a gaming PC, then I feel like I'm more a continuous part of a gaming ecosystem as a whole. As opposed to [on console], my gaming is kind of sharded -- to use a gaming term -- based on these different closed ecosystems that I have to play across."

An anonymous reader shares a report:Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an "AI PC" for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we're still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft's requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC -- and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft's Copilot key. Microsoft wants its OEM partners to provide a combination of hardware and software for its idea of an AI PC. That includes a system that comes with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), the latest CPUs and GPUs, and access to Copilot. It will also need to have the new Copilot key that Microsoft announced earlier this year.

This requirement means that some laptops, like Asus' new ROG Zephyrus, have already shipped with Intel's new Core Ultra chips and aren't technically AI PCs in the eyes of Microsoft's strict requirements because they don't have a Copilot key. But they're still AI PCs in Intel's eyes. "Our joint aligned definition, Intel and Microsoft, we've aligned on Core Ultra, Copilot, and Copilot key," explains Todd Lewellen, head of the PC ecosystem at Intel, in a press briefing with The Verge. "From an Intel perspective our AI PC has Core Ultra and it has an integrated NPU because it is unlocking all kinds of new capabilities and functions in the AI space. We have great alignment with Microsoft, but there are going to be some systems out there that may not have the physical key on it but it does have our integrated NPU."

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Microsoft is starting to preview mouse and keyboard support for Xbox Cloud Gaming today. Xbox Insiders will be able to start playing with their mouse and keyboard in Edge, Chrome, or the Xbox app on Windows PCs, nearly two years after Microsoft announced it was preparing to add mouse and keyboard support to its Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) service. Not every game will be supported during the preview, but there's a large selection, including Fortnite, Sea of Thieves, and Halo Infinite. Microsoft warns that some games will display controller UI elements briefly before adapting to mouse and keyboard input after you start interacting with the game.

If you're interested in trying games with mouse and keyboard in the browser version of Xbox Cloud Gaming, then you'll need to be in full-screen mode, according to Microsoft. This is so the game can correctly capture your pointer as input. If you want to exit out of mouse and keyboard mode and use an Xbox controller instead, there's an ALT+F9 shortcut to do so. The full list of supported games include: Fortnite (browser only), ARK Survival Evolved, Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Halo Infinite, Atomic Heart, Sniper Elite 5, Deep Rock Galactic, High on Life, Zombie Army 4 Dead War, Gears Tactics, Pentiment, Doom 64, and Age of Empires 2.

Google is releasing an optimized version of its Chrome browser for Windows on Arm this week, the search giant has announced alongside chipmaker Qualcomm. From a report: The official release comes two months after an early version of the browser was spotted in Chrome's Canary channel. Qualcomm says the release "will roll out starting today."

The release will be a big deal for any Chrome users with Windows machines powered by Arm-based processors, who'll now have access to a much faster native browser. That's in contrast to the x64 version of Chrome they've previously had to run in an emulated state with slow performance. Arm-based users have previously been able to turn to Microsoft's Edge, which is already available for Windows on Arm devices.

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Microsoft is naming Pavan Davuluri as its new Windows and Surface chief today. After Panos Panay's surprise departure to Amazon last year, Microsoft split up the Windows and Surface groups under two different leaders. Davuluri took over the Surface silicon and devices work, with Mikhail Parakhin leading a new team focused on Windows and web experiences. Now both Windows and Surface will be Davuluri's responsibility, as Parakhin has "decided to explore new roles."

The Verge has obtained an internal memo from Rajesh Jha, Microsoft's head of experiences and devices, outlining the new Windows organization. Microsoft is now bringing together its Windows and devices teams once more. "This will enable us to take a holistic approach to building silicon, systems, experiences, and devices that span Windows client and cloud for this AI era," explains Jha. Pavan Davuluri is now the leader of Microsoft's Windows and Surface team, reporting directly to Rajesh Jha. Davuluri has worked at Microsoft for more than 23 years and was deeply involved in the company's work with Qualcomm and AMD to create custom Surface processors.

Mikhail Parakhin will now report to Kevin Scott during a transition phase, but his future at Microsoft looks uncertain, and it's likely those "new roles" will be outside the company. Parakhin had been working closely on Bing Chat before taking on the broader Windows engineering responsibilities and changes to Microsoft Edge. The Windows shake-up comes just days after Google DeepMind co-founder and former Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft as the CEO of a new AI team. Microsoft also hired a bunch of Inflection AI employees, including co-founder Karen Simonyan who is now the chief scientist of Microsoft AI.

China has introduced new guidelines that will mean US microprocessors from Intel and AMD are phased out of government PCs and servers [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; non-paywalled source], as Beijing ramps up a campaign to replace foreign technology with homegrown solutions. From a report: The stricter government procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft's Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favour of domestic options. It runs alongside a parallel localisation drive under way in state-owned enterprises. The latest purchasing rules represent China's most significant step yet to build up domestic substitutes for foreign technology and echo moves in the US as tensions increase between the two countries. Washington has imposed sanctions on a growing number of Chinese companies on national security grounds, legislated to encourage more tech to be produced in the US and blocked exports of advanced chips and related tools to China.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nvidia earned its $2.2 trillion market cap by producing AI chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from startups to Microsoft, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Almost as important to its hardware is the company's nearly 20 years' worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia's CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm, Google and Intel, plans to loosen Nvidia's chokehold by going after the chip giant's secret weapon: the software that keeps developers tied to Nvidia chips.

They are part of an expanding group of financiers and companies hacking away at Nvidia's dominance in AI. "We're actually showing developers how you migrate out from an Nvidia platform," Vinesh Sukumar, Qualcomm's head of AI and machine learning, said in an interview with Reuters. Starting with a piece of technology developed by Intel called OneAPI, the UXL Foundation, a consortium of tech companies, plans to build a suite of software and tools that will be able to power multiple types of AI accelerator chips, executives involved with the group told Reuters. The open-source project aims to make computer code run on any machine, regardless of what chip and hardware powers it.

"It's about specifically - in the context of machine learning frameworks - how do we create an open ecosystem, and promote productivity and choice in hardware," Google's director and chief technologist of high-performance computing, Bill Hugo, told Reuters in an interview. Google is one of the founding members of UXL and helps determine the technical direction of the project, Hugo said. UXL's technical steering committee is preparing to nail down technical specifications in the first half of this year. Engineers plan to refine the technical details to a "mature" state by the end of the year, executives said. These executives stressed the need to build a solid foundation to include contributions from multiple companies that can also be deployed on any chip or hardware.

Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft developer, has shared the story behind the Format drive dialog box in Windows, which has remained unchanged for nearly three decades. According to Plummer, the dialog box was created as a temporary solution during the porting of code from Windows 95 to Windows NT, due to differences between the two operating systems. Plummer jotted down all the formatting options on a piece of paper and created a basic UI, intending it to be a placeholder until a more refined version could be developed. However, the intended UI improvement never materialized, and Plummer's temporary solution has persisted through numerous Windows versions, including the latest Windows 11.

Plummer also admitted that the 32GB limit on FAT volume size in Windows was an arbitrary decision he made at the time, which has since become a permanent constraint.

"Hollywood is bracing for another actors strike, this time against the videogame industry," according to MarketWatch: "We're currently in bargaining with all the major game studios, and the major sticking point is AI," SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Thursday. "Actors at all levels are at risk of digital replication. We have strike authorization on that contract and it is, at this point — we could end up going on strike...."

The union, which navigated its way to a new film and TV contract after a 118-day strike against the Hollywood studios last year, is again focusing on regulating artificial intelligence and its impact on wages and jobs. "It will be a recurring issue with each successive contract" every three years, Crabtree-Ireland said.
Some studios are already using AI-generated voices to save money, the article points out. "Actors and actresses should be very much afraid," Chris Mattmann, an adjunct research professor at the University of Southern California's Computer Science Department, says in the article. "Within three seconds, gen AI can effectively clone a voice."

The strike could affect Microsoft's Activision Publishing and Disney, as well as other major game publishers including Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Warner Bros.

Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and others spoke at the Game Developers Conference about Tetris Reversed, reports VentureBeat — and told the story of "a lost prototype of a Tetris game that was never published." But little did Pajitnov know that an engineer in charge of the game, Vedran Klanac, had kept a copy of it. Through the help of intermediaries, he showed it to Pajitnov and the two shared their memories of what happened to the lost game...

Pajitnov has lived in the U.S. since 1991, where he has been involved in the development of games such as Pandora's Box and worked with companies such as Microsoft and WildSnake Software... Klanac is the CEO of Ocean Media, and he is originally from Zagreb, Croatia. He was an aerospace engineer who started his career in the games industry with Croteam where he built the physics engine for Serious Sam 2.

Since 2006, he has been running Ocean Media, a game publishing company with a focus on consoles. During the last 20 years, he was involved in production as a programmer and executive producer in more than 200 projects. And it turns out he was the programmer who created the Tetris Reversed code based on instructions from Pajitnov, who had passed them on through a middleman. In 2011, programmer Vedran Klanac went to the NLGD Festival of Games in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He listened to a talk on a charitable effort from Martin de Ronde, a cofounder of game studio Guerrilla Games. Klanac said in an interview with GamesBeat that he listened to De Ronde's talk and offered to help. De Ronde came back months later saying he had an agreement with Pajitnov about creating a new prototype for a Tetris game.

De Ronde asked if Klanac if he wanted to make Tetris Reversed by Pajitnov.

"Are you kidding me?" Klanac reacted.
The idea is still to survive as long as you can, according to the article — but the entire playfield was accessible. "For the first time in public, they showed the video of the prototype in action," according to the article, which also records Pajitnov reaction. "When you see the gameplay video, and when you look at the design elements. This is Tetris for like 300 IQ people."

No word on yet on whether the game will ever be officially published.