Categories
Featured

Microsoft and Google vie for top spot in productivity and business app leadership in latest report — Google has a upper hand due to its platform dominance but Microsoft’s LinkedIn emerges as the ultimate Pro social network

[ad_1]

A new study analyzing Google Play downloads of productivity tools has shown an overwhelming majority of mobile users turning to their smartphones to navigate their professional lives and schedule day-to-day tasks.

The report by SplitMetrics found the top apps in the business and productivity categories have amassed a staggering 4.7 billion and 55 billion downloads respectively. Microsoft’s LinkedIn leads the business category with a whopping 1.5 billion lifetime downloads, followed by video conferencing giants Zoom (1.1bn) and Microsoft Teams (426m), then OfficeSuite (195m) and Indeed (188m).

[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Entertainment

Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership was born from Google AI envy

[ad_1]

Emails from the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google revealed how Microsoft executives were alarmed by and even envious of Google’s AI lead.

In an email thread, CTO Kevin Scott wrote he was “very, very worried” about Google’s rapidly growing AI capabilities. He said he initially dismissed the company’s “game-playing stunts,” likely referring to Google’s AlphaGo models. The emails reference Gmail’s autocomplete features, which execs called “scary good.” Microsoft struggled to copy Google’s BERT-large, an AI model that deciphers the meaning and context of words in a sentence. It took the company six hours to replicate the model, while Google inched further ahead on more elaborate, bigger models.

Scott said Microsoft had “very smart” people on its machine-learning teams but their ambitions had been curbed and that their company was “multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.” This all led to a billion-dollar push into OpenAI in 2019. It’s since invested $13 billion.

— Mat Smith

​​You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here!

LinkedIn, the career-centric social network, is getting into gaming. But the kind of earnest, word-based games your mom would let you play when you were a kid. LinkedIn describes them as “thinking-oriented games,” though the format will likely look familiar to fans of The New York Times Games app. You can only play each game once a day, and you can share your score with friends. And just maybe… strike up a conversation on how you can help each other with targeted SaaS projects. Yes, I have feelings about who hits me up on LinkedIn.

Continue reading.

TikTok is allegedly violating Apple’s App Store rules, with the app allowing (even recommending) particular users to purchase its coins directly from its website. TikTok has apparently given some iOS users the option to “Try recharging on tiktok.com to avoid in-app service fees” — namely Apple’s 30 percent commission on purchases, which are more likely than not passed onto those users. It’s definitely not available to all users and seems to be there for TikTok users who have previously bought a large number of coins — the TikTok , if you will.

Continue reading.

TMATMA

Rabbit

The Rabbit R1, a pocket-sized AI virtual assistant device, runs Android under the hood. Now early users have been able to tease out the R1 APK, install it on an Android phone and make it work — if not with all the features. If that’s the case, what’s the point in the $200 gadget?

In a statement sent to Android Authority, Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu, said the Rabbit R1 is “not an Android app.” He added the R1 ran on very bespoke AOSP (Android Open Source Project) build and lower-level firmware modifications, so a local bootleg APK won’t be able to access most R1 services. We’re wrapping up our own detailed review — stay tuned.

Continue reading.



[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Featured

Ditch Microsoft’s data-gathering and take control of your Windows 11 experience with the new Tiny11 Builder tool

[ad_1]

The developers of Tiny11 (a slimmed-down third-party version of Windows 11) have released a new version of their Tiny11 Builder, a tool that enables you to modify and customize your own version of Windows 11 to make it more trimmed-down. 

This version will allow you to make Windows 11 ISOs (installation media) with disabled telemetry – basically, Microsoft’s inbuilt automated data collection and communication process for monitoring, analysis, and reporting of your system. Disabling telemetry has multiple implications for increasing user privacy, using fewer system resources to run Windows 11, and getting greater control over your user data.



[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Entertainment

Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership was born from Google envy

[ad_1]

It turns out the lay of today’s AI landscape can be traced back to — what do you know — fear, jealousy and intense capitalist ambition. Emails revealed in the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, first reported by Business Insider, show Microsoft executives expressing alarm and envy over Google’s AI lead. That spurred an urgency that led to the Windows maker’s initial billion-dollar investment in its now-indispensable partner, OpenAI.

In a heavily redacted 2019 email thread titled “Thoughts on OpenAI,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella forwards a lengthy message from CTO Kevin Scott to CFO Amy Hood. “Very good email that explains, why I want us to do this … and also why we will then ensure our infra folks execute,” Nadella wrote.

Scott wrote that he was “very, very worried” about Google’s rapidly growing AI capabilities. He says he initially dismissed the company’s “game-playing stunts,” likely referring to Google’s AlphaGo models. One of them beat Go world champion Ke Jie in 2017, a remarkable feat at the time. (Google’s later models surpassed that one, dropping the need for human training altogether.)

But Scott says brushing off Google’s game-playing progress “was a mistake.” “When they took all of the infrastructure that they had built to build [natural language] models that we couldn’t easily replicate, I started to take things more seriously,” Scott wrote. “And as I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried.”

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott presenting onstage in front of a blue wall with a Microsoft logo on it. Blurred audience heads in the foreground.Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott presenting onstage in front of a blue wall with a Microsoft logo on it. Blurred audience heads in the foreground.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott (Microsoft)

Scott recounts how Microsoft struggled to copy Google’s BERT-large, an AI model that deciphers the meaning and context of words in a sentence. Scott pinned the blame on infrastructure leaps its rival had made — and that Microsoft hadn’t.

“Turns out, just replicating BERT-large wasn’t easy to do for us. Even though we had the template for the model, it took us ~6 months to get the model trained because our infrastructure wasn’t up to the task,” the Microsoft CTO wrote. “Google had BERT for at least six months prior to that, so in the time that it took us to hack together the capability to train a 340M parameter model, they had a year to figure out how to get it into production and to move on to larger scale, more interesting models.”

He also admired and envied Google’s Gmail auto-complete capabilities, saying it was “getting scarily good.” He commented that Microsoft was “multiple years behind the competition in terms of [machine learning] scale.” He commented on the “interesting” growth of OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Brain.

Scott touted Microsoft’s “very smart” people on its machine-learning teams but said their ambitions were curbed. “But the core deep learning teams within each of these bigger teams are very small, and their ambitions have also been constrained, which means that even as we start to feed them resources, they still have to go through a learning process to scale up,” Scott wrote. “And we are multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.”

After prompting Hood that Scott’s concerns were “why I want us to do this,” meaning invest in OpenAI, the company made good on its CEO’s wishes. Microsoft invested a billion dollars in the Sam Altman-led startup in 2019, and the rest is a rapidly changing history. (It’s now invested $13 billion.) It’s a technology that does some incredible things but threatens to gut the labor market and give propagandists their most powerful tools to date in what was already an age of rampant disinformation.

[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Featured

Fed up with Windows 10 search being slow, wonky, or crashing? Microsoft’s fixed search with its latest update

[ad_1]

Windows 10 has received a new optional update and it comes with some much-needed fixing to cure problems some users have been experiencing with the search function in the OS.

Windows Latest noticed that in the latest preview update just released for Windows 10 (KB5036979), there’s been some work to improve the search functionality.

[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Entertainment

Microsoft’s lightweight Phi-3 Mini model can run on smartphones

[ad_1]

Microsoft has unveiled its latest light AI model called the Phi-3 Mini designed to run on smartphones and other local devices, it revealed in a new research paper. Trained on 3.8 billion parameters, it’s the first of three small Phi-3 language models the company will release in the near future. The aim is to provide a cheaper alternative to cloud-powered LLMs, allowing smaller organizations to adopt AI.

According to Microsoft, the new model handily outperforms its previous Phi-2 small model and is on par with larger models like Llama 2. In fact, the company says Phi-3 Mini provides responses close to the level of a model 10 times its size.

“The innovation lies entirely in our dataset for training,” according to the research paper. That dataset is based on the Phi-2 model, but uses “heavily filtered web data and synthetic data,” the team states. In fact, a separate LLM was used to do both of those chores, effectively creating new data that allows the smaller language model to be more efficient. The team was supposedly inspired by children’s books that use simpler language to get across complex topics, according to The Verge.

Microsoft's lightweight Phi-3 Mini model can run on smartphonesMicrosoft's lightweight Phi-3 Mini model can run on smartphones

Microsoft

While it still can’t produce the results of cloud-powered LLMs, Phi-3 Mini can outperform Phi-2 and other small language models (Mistral, Gemma, Llama-3-In) in tasks ranging from math to programming to academic tests. At the same time, it runs on devices as simple as smartphones, with no internet connection required.

Its main limitation is breadth of “factual knowledge” due to the smaller dataset size — hence why it doesn’t perform well in the “TriviaQA” test. Still, it should be good for models like that only require smallish internal data sets. That could allow companies that can’t afford cloud-connected LLMs to jump into AI, Microsoft hopes.

Phi-3 Mini is now available on Azure, Hugging Face and Ollama. Microsoft is next set to release Phi-3 Small and Phi-3 Medium with significantly higher capabilities (7 billion and 14 billion parameters, respectively).

This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.

[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Bisnis Industri

Cupertino fires back after Microsoft’s ‘Apple tax’ ads

[ad_1]

April 16 Today in Apple history April 16, 2009: Apple hits back at Microsoft following an advertisement that criticizes Cupertino for failing to sell decent laptops for less than $1,000.

“A PC is no bargain when it doesn’t do what you want,” Mac PR director Bill Evans tells Bloomberg. “The one thing that both Apple and Microsoft can agree on is that everyone thinks the Mac is cool. With its great designs and advanced software, nothing matches it at any price.”

Apple vs. Microsoft: An ad battle

Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” ad campaign, which prompted Apple’s response, followed customers as they went in search of affordable laptops. The ads spotlighted the “Apple tax” — the premium paid by consumers who bought Macs over much more affordable Windows PCs.

As can be seen in the below example, the Microsoft ads did not criticize Apple laptops for any design element or performance shortcoming. Rather, they focused on pricing.

The young woman in this particular ad sets out to find a laptop with a 17-inch screen for less than $1,000. Shocker: She doesn’t find one in an Apple store.

Hitting back at Apple’s ‘I’m a Mac’ ads

Microsoft also commissioned a controversial report from Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates. It compared the prices, and hardware differences, of Apple computers and PCs.

Microsoft’s goal in all this? To counter the negative image of the PC fueled by Apple’s popular “I’m a Mac” ad campaign.

Redmond had reason to worry. After dominating Apple throughout the 1990s, Microsoft was starting to decline in popularity in the 2000s. At the same time, Apple was enjoying a hot streak. This was partially thanks to the “halo effect” of hit products like the iPhone and iPod, which brought in new fans.

In May 2010, Apple finally overtook Microsoft in market value. A little over a year after that, on August 9, 2011, Apple blew past oil giant ExxonMobil to become the world’s most valuable company. But time changes everything — MSFT is valued at over $3 trillion while AAPL is down at about $2.6 trillion.

Still, these days the war between the two tech giants is over, to the point that they cooperate in many ways. There are Apple Music and Apple TV apps for Windows, Windows users can send and receive messages and calls via an iPhone, and much more.

Have you always been an Apple fan, or did you switch over from PC? Let us know your story below.



[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Entertainment

Microsoft’s Windows 11 beta testers may start seeing ads in the Start menu

[ad_1]

Microsoft is exploring the idea of putting ads in your Windows 11 Start menu. To be specific, it’s looking to place advertisements for apps you can find in the Microsoft Store in the menu’s recommended section. I could hear you sighing in defeat if you’ve used Windows 10 extensively before — the older OS serves ads in the Start menu, as well, and they’re also for apps you can download. At the moment, Microsoft will only show ads in this version if you’re in the US and a Windows Insider in the Beta Channel. You won’t be seeing them if you’re not a beta tester or if you’re using a device managed by an organization.

Further, you can disable the advertisements altogether. To do so, just go to Personalization under Settings and then toggle off “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more” in the Start section. Like any other Microsoft experiment, it may never reach wider rollout, but you may want to remember the aforementioned steps, since the company does have history of incorporating ads into its desktop platforms. Last year, Microsoft also deployed experimental promo spots for its services like OneDrive in the menu that pops up when you click on your profile photo.

A screenshot of the Windows 11 start menu showing an advertisement for 1Password.A screenshot of the Windows 11 start menu showing an advertisement for 1Password.

Microsoft

[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Bisnis Industri

Microsoft’s new Arm laptops might surpass M3 MacBook Air performance

[ad_1]

Apple's M3 chip
Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Elite CPU might be faster than Apple’s M3 chip.
Photo: Apple

Microsoft’s upcoming “AI PCs” might finally rival the performance of Apple’s latest MacBook Air. The new Arm-based Windows laptops, due for unveiling at a special event on May 20th, will use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors.

Reportedly, the new Qualcomm CPU is faster than the M3 MacBook Air in CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and app emulation.

New Arm-based Windows AI PCs could finally beat MacBook Air’s performance

After switching to Apple silicon in late 2020, MacBooks have delivered significantly better performance and efficiency than Windows laptops. The gap has only grown further since then.

In contrast, Microsoft has been claiming for years that its Arm-based Windows laptops will rival the performance of the latest MacBook Air but had little to show for it. This was primarily due to the Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU not delivering the expected performance.

Microsoft’s upcoming new Snapdragon X Elite-powered “AI PCs,” scheduled for a May 20th launch, might change this. The Verge claims the company is upbeat about the new CPU’s performance. It will have several demos showing its newest laptops beating the M3 MacBook Air in CPU, AI acceleration, and app emulations.

Apparently, the new PCs will provide faster app emulation than Rosetta 2. This should enable Windows apps designed for 64-bit CPUs to offer the same level of performance when running on Arm-based Windows laptops.

Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 might also use Snapdragon X Elite CPU

Microsoft will reportedly switch to the Snapdragon X Elite CPU in its upcoming Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 as well. The company has already unveiled the business variant of the two devices, which feature Intel Core Ultra processors. However, the consumer models will use a Qualcomm CPU.

Performance is just one of the many aspects of a laptop. The upcoming Snapdragon X Elite-powered Windows PCs might beat the M3 MacBook Air in some tasks. But it remains to be seen whether these devices will have a sleek design and long battery life as Apple’s offering.



[ad_2]

Source Article Link

Categories
Bisnis Industri

Z80 SoftCard is Microsoft’s first hardware: Today in Apple history

[ad_1]

April 2: Today in Apple history: Microsoft Z80 SoftCard, the company's first hardware, debuts on Apple II April 2, 1980: Microsoft releases its first hardware product, the Z80 SoftCard. A microprocessor card that plugs into the Apple II, it allows the computer to run programs designed for the CP/M operating system, a popular OS for business software.

Arriving several years before the first version of Windows, the Z80 SoftCard quickly becomes a big hit for Microsoft.

Microsoft, the hardware company?

A straightforward plug-and-play peripheral for the Apple II, the Z80 SoftCard contained a Zilog Z80 CPU and the necessary “decoding circuitry” to read the signals on the Apple computer’s bus.

It allowed the Apple II to run much more business software, most notably the popular word processor WordStar, which required a Z80 CPU.

At the time of its introduction, InfoWorld magazine referred to the Z80 SoftCard as a “fascinating piece of hardware.”

“If you need a lightweight, portable Z80 computer, the Apple/SoftCard combination is a perfect pair,” the publication concluded.

Microsoft Z80 SoftCard becomes a hit

The $349 card (the equivalent of nearly $1,400 today) was, in some ways, a surprise hit for Microsoft. Coming packaged with Microsoft BASIC, it debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980 and went on sale the following month. In its first three months, Microsoft sold 5,000 units — considered a big success at the time.

In fact, the Z80 SoftCard quickly became Microsoft’s No. 1 revenue source. And it remained the company’s most successful hardware product until it introduced a mouse in 1983.

Microsoft continued its involvement with Apple for the next few years — albeit increasingly in software. By the mid-1980s, Microsoft became one of Apple’s most valuable developers. So much so that Apple CEO John Sculley signed a damaging contract to keep Bill Gates and Co. hanging around.

First came the Z80 SoftCard, then Windows …

By the end of the 1980s, Microsoft achieved great success with Windows. The PC operating system proved so popular that Microsoft challenged Apple in the marketplace.

Over the next 20 years, Microsoft’s software-based business model dominated the tech industry, eclipsing Apple’s own-everything-we-make approach.

In recent years, Microsoft accelerated its hardware push with its Surface lineup, producing tabletop computers, laptops, hybrid tablets, dual-screen Android devices and even touchscreen whiteboards. The company’s recent focus on artificial intelligence once again vaulted it to the top of the market capitalization heap.



[ad_2]

Source Article Link