One of the last major hurdles to Microsoft’s massive $69 billion acquisition of video game giant Activision Blizzard has been cleared: The European Union has approved the merger, with a few conditions. But that might not matter much, as both the United States and the United Kingdom are blocking it. The decision shows that, though…
Remember Clippy? It was a rudimentary attempt at helping you write documents in Office 2000 through 2003. Fast forward 20 years and now large language models (LLM) are now able to deliver on the original concept of helping users create content. Back in January, Microsoft expanded their investment in OpenAI, with a reported $10 Billion…
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24016883/STK093_Google_06.jpg)
Microsoft made a big splash yesterday with new ChatGPT-powered upgrades to its Bing search engine and Edge browser. Today, in what feels unlikely to be a coincidence, Google has its own event taking place. “Join us to learn how we’re opening up greater access to information for people everywhere, through Search, Maps and beyond,” Google’s…
Eric Broder Van Dyke/Shutterstock Playing video games is supposed to be fun, but it can be tough to have a good time when you can’t use the controls. For people with disabilities and mobility issues, this has been a challenge for as long as video games have existed. To help make gaming more accessible to…
Microsoft has begun rolling out Image Creator from Microsoft Bing in a preview to select markets, preparing the AI art generator for a wider rollout to Microsoft Edge later this month. In a blog post and related video, the company showed off how Image Creator will work and explained in more detail what limitations it…
Microsoft Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 5 continues Microsoft’s tradition of providing a general all-around productivity laptop, though there’s one pronounced change for this generation: Microsoft has settled on a 12th-gen “Alder Lake” Core chip from Intel—and that’s it. The Surface Laptop 5 won’t offer us the chance to directly compare Intel’s latest Core against AMD’s latest…
Microsoft has announced it is making over 1,500 emojis in its library open source for developer and creator use as of Wednesday. You can access the Microsoft emoji library on Figma and Github, with the brand noting that images can be saved as SVG, PNG, and JPG files “to allow for true versatility.” However, Microsoft recommends…
A small idea born in the Microsoft Redmond campus in Seattle, Washington, has grown to become a full-blown digital farm marketplace in Zambia. Between September 2017 and August 2021, Chris Chileshe, a Zambian-American, worked as a software engineer at Microsoft in its Redmond campus, where he got exposed to sophisticated urban farming. The Microsoft campus…
Microsoft’s developers conference, Build 2022, is happening this week, and amid the flurry of announcements was something very Apple-like. In fact, if you weren’t paying close attention, you might have thought Microsoft released its own Mac. It’s called Project Volterra and it involves a new Windows for Arm developers kit in a PC that looks…
Why it matters: Microsoft’s latest Patch Tuesday updates are out for Windows 11 and Windows 10 users, and they contain a long list of fixes and some quality of life improvements. You can postpone these for one or two weeks, but keep in mind that the update contains essential fixes for security vulnerabilities already being…