A French start-up founded four weeks ago by a trio of former Meta and Google artificial intelligence researchers has raised $113.3 million in Europe's largest-ever seed round. From a report: Mistral AI's first round of financing values the Paris-based concern at $259 million, including the funds raised, according to people close to the company. The record amount raised highlights the growing frenzy surrounding AI and Europe's desire to create a viable alternative to Silicon Valley companies such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google's DeepMind.

"There is a rising awareness of the fact that this technology is transformative and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator, as a customer and an investor," said Arthur Mensch, Mistral's chief executive. The former DeepMind researcher founded the start-up with Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, who both recently left Meta after working at Facebook's parent company for the past few years. [...] Mistral has yet to develop its first product, and its first few employees started work only days ago. It plans to launch early next year a new "large language model," similar to the "generative AI" system that powers OpenAI's breakout ChatGPT app.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Not so long ago, Microsoft Edge ended up in hot waters after users discovered a bug leaking your browser history to Bing. Now you may want to toggle off another feature to ensure Edge is not sending every picture you view online to Microsoft. Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use "super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web." Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works. The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements.

The Federal Trade Commission is set to file for an injunction on Monday seeking to block Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, CNBC reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter. From the report: By filing for an injunction, the FTC is seeking to stop the acquisition from going through before the deal's July 18 deadline.

20 miles west of Portland, engineers at an Intel lab are dunking expensive racks of servers "in a clear bath" made of motor oil-like petrochemicals, reports the Oregonian, where the servers "give off a greenish glow as they silently labor away on ordinary computing tasks." Intel's submerged computers operate just as they would on a dry server rack because they're not bathing in water, even though it looks just like it. They're soaking in a synthetic oil that doesn't conduct electricity. So the computers don't short out.

They thrive, in fact, because the fluid absorbs the heat from the hardworking computers much better than air does. It's the same reason a hot pan cools off a lot more quickly if you soak it in water than if you leave it on the stove.

As data centers grow increasingly powerful, the computers are generating so much heat that cooling them uses exorbitant amounts of energy. The cooling systems can use as much electricity as the computers themselves. So Intel and other big tech companies are designing liquid cooling systems that could use far less electricity, hoping to lower data centers' energy costs by as much as a third — and reducing the facilities' climate impact. It's a wholesale change in thinking for data centers, which already account for 2% of all the electricity consumption in the U.S... Skeptics caution that it may be difficult or prohibitively expensive to overhaul existing data centers to adapt to liquid cooling. Advocates of the shift, including Intel, say a transition is imperative to accommodate data centers' growing thirst for power. "It's really starting to come to a head as we're hitting the energy crisis and the need for climate action globally," said Jen Huffstetler, Intel's chief product sustainability officer...

Cooler computers can be packed more tightly together in data centers, since they don't need space for airflow. Computer manufacturers can pack chips together more tightly on the motherboard, enabling more computing power in the same space. And liquid cooling could significantly reduce data centers' environmental and economic costs. Conventional data centers' evaporative cooling systems require tremendous volumes of water and huge amounts of electricity...

Many other tech companies are backing immersion cooling, too. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all helping fund immersion cooling research at Oregon State... [T]he timing may finally be right for data centers operators to make the shift away from air cooling to something far more efficient. Intel's Huffstetler said she expects to see liquid cooling become widespread in the next three to five years.
The article notes other challenges:

• liquid adds more weight than some buildings' upper floors can support
• Some metals degrade faster in liquid than they do in air.
• And the engineers had to modify the servers by removing their fans — "because they serve no purpose while immersed."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Insider: The recent tsunami of tech layoffs could leave a wave of union organizing in its wake. That's according to Skylar Hinnant, a senior QA tester at Microsoft's ZeniMax, who supported a successful union campaign at the gaming unit of the software giant... Within tech companies, roles such as quality assurance testers and contractors are less revered, so those workers are more likely to unionize, Hinnant explained. "In these roles, people will be treated differently, it's sort of derogatory," he added.

Layoffs, cuts in perks, and other benefits, and a slowing of pay increases have marred the tech industry's reputation as a great place to work. That has kicked off a power struggle between employees and management. "When an employer lays off 16,000 employees in a day, that's a power play making employees realize how powerless they are," Rahul Dhaundiyal, a director of engineering at Indeed, told Insider... Dhaundiyal agreed with Hinnant that for lower-level tech workers the call to unionize rings louder. "In certain lower paid jobs where decision-making is top-down, where you are seen as a resource and not a human being to invest in, those kinds of roles end up maximizing disbalance and would unionize first," Dhaundiyal said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Security researchers have linked to the notorious Clop ransomware gang a new wave of mass-hacks targeting a popular file transfer tool, as the first victims of the attacks begin to come forward. It was revealed last week that hackers are exploiting a newly discovered vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer, a file-transfer tool widely used by enterprises to share large files over the internet. The vulnerability allows hackers to gain unauthorized access to an affected MOVEit server's database. Progress Software, which develops the MOVEit software, has already released some patches. Over the weekend, the first victims of the attacks began to come forward.

Zellis, a U.K.-based human resources software maker and payroll provider, confirmed in a statement that its MOVEit system was compromised, with the incident affecting a "small number" of its corporate customers. One of those customers is U.K. airline giant British Airways, which told TechCrunch that the breach included the payroll data of all of its U.K.-based employees. [...] The U.K.'s BBC also confirmed it was affected by the incident affecting Zellis. [...] The government of Nova Scotia, which uses MOVEit to share files across departments, said in a statement that some citizens' personal information may have been compromised. The Nova Scotia government said it took its affected system offline, and is working to determine "exactly what information was stolen, and how many people have been impacted."

It was initially unclear who was behind this new wave of hacks, but Microsoft security researchers are attributing the cyberattacks to a group it tracks as "Lace Tempest." This gang is a known affiliate of the Russia-linked Clop ransomware group, which was previously linked to mass-attacks exploiting flaws in Fortra's GoAnywhere file transfer tool and Accellion's file transfer application. Microsoft researchers said that the exploitation of the MOVEit vulnerability is often followed by data exfiltration. Mandiant isn't yet making the same attribution as Microsoft, but noted in a blog post over the weekend that there are "notable" similarities between a newly created threat cluster it's calling UNC4857 that has as-of-yet "unknown motivations," and FIN11, a well-established ransomware group known to operate Clop ransomware. "Ongoing analysis of emerging activity may provide additional insights," Mandiant said. "It's likely many more victims of the MOVEit breach will come to light over the next few days," adds TechCrunch.

"Shodan, a search engine for publicly exposed devices and databases, showed that more than 2,500 MOVEit Transfer servers were discoverable on the internet."

Pornhub visitors in Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas will see a "very important message" on the adult website's homepage starting today. From a report: Pornhub's public service announcement prompts visitors to contact representatives and oppose recently passed age-verification laws in these states that Pornhub claims puts children and all users' privacy at risk. If users don't support Pornhub before laws go into effect, the company says, Pornhub could potentially restrict access in these states -- a threat it already followed through on in Utah.

In the PSA, adult entertainer Cherie Deville tells Pornhub users that instead of states requiring ID to access adult content, "the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to verify users' age at a device level and allow or block access to age-restricted materials and websites accordingly." According to CNN, this PSA is part of a larger effort by Pornhub and its private equity owners, Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), to work with big tech companies to create new device-based age verification solutions. So far, ECP partner Solomon Friedman told CNN that ECP has lobbied Apple, Google, and Microsoft to "develop a technological standard that might turn a user's electronic device into the proof of age necessary to access restricted online content."

OpenAI is still not training GPT-5, months after the Microsoft-backed startup pledged to not work on the successor to GPT-4Â"for some time" after many industry executives and academics expressed concerns about the fast-rate of advancements by Sam Altman's large language models. From a report: "We have a lot of work to do before we start that model," Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said at a conference hosted by Indian newspaper Economic Times. "We're working on the new ideas that we think we need for it, but we are certainly not close to it to start."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has no plans to go public any time soon, Chief Executive Sam Altman said at a conference in Abu Dhabi. "When we develop super intelligence, we are likely to make some decisions that most investors would look at very strangely," Altman said. "I don't want to be sued by ... public market, Wall Street etc, so no, not that interested," he said in response to a question on whether he will take OpenAI public.

OpenAI has so far raised $10 billion from Microsoft (MSFT.O) at a valuation of almost $30 billion as it invests more on building computing capacity. "We have a very strange structure. We have this cap to profit thing," he said. OpenAI started off as a non-profit organization but later created a hybrid "capped-profit" company, that allowed it to raise external funds with a promise that the original non-profit operation still benefits.

Altman is on a whirlwind tour across the world, meeting heads of states of several countries, and was in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday. He plans to travel next to Qatar, India and South Korea. While in Europe he got into controversy for saying OpenAI may leave the region if it becomes too hard to comply with planned laws on AI, inviting criticism from several lawmakers, including EU industry chief Thierry Breton. OpenAI later reversed the stance. "We did not threaten to leave the EU," Altman said on Tuesday. "We expect to be able to comply. There's still more clarity we are waiting for on the EU AI Act, but we are very excited to operate in Europe."

Microsoft has agreed to pay $20 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it illegally collected personal information from children without parental consent and retained it for extended periods. TechCrunch reports: The federal consumer watchdog said Microsoft violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the federal law that governs the online privacy protections for children under the age of 13, which requires companies notify parents about the data they collect, obtain parental consent and delete the data when it's no longer necessary. The FTC said children signing up to Microsoft's Xbox gaming service were asked to provide their personal information -- including their name, email address, phone number and date of birth -- which until 2019 included a pre-filled check box allowing Microsoft to share user information with advertisers. The FTC said Microsoft collected this data before asking for the parent to complete the account setup, but held onto children's data even if the parent abandoned the sign-up process.

"Only after gathering that raft of personal data from children did Microsoft get parents involved in the process," said FTC's Lesley Fair in a corresponding blog post. As a result, the FTC will require Microsoft to notify parents and obtain consent for accounts created before May 2021. Microsoft will also have to establish new systems to delete children's personal information if it hasn't obtained parental consent, and to ensure the data is deleted when it's no longer needed.

A major Austrian opposition political party on Monday corrected the results of a closely contested leadership election after it announced the wrong winner over the weekend due to a "technical" error: Someone had messed up an Excel spreadsheet. From a report: At a convention on Saturday, Austria's Social Democrats (SPO) declared that Hans Peter Doskozil, governor of the eastern Burgenland province, was the new leader of the center-left party. But on Monday, the party said Andreas Babler, a small-town mayor and lesser-known figure, had actually won, with about 52 percent of the votes. "Unfortunately, the paper ballots did not match the result that was announced digitally," Michaela Grubesa, head of the SPÃ- electoral commission, said a news conference. "Due to a colleague's technical error in the Excel list, the result was mixed up."

Those familiar with Microsoft's spreadsheet program, which is used by millions around the world, were quick to crack jokes, bringing wider attention to the error and ensuing chaos. Babler said at a news conference after his belated apparent victory that the commission should count the vote again for accuracy's sake, local media reported, adding that the debacle was "painful for everyone involved" and bad for the party's image.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has made a tiny bit of progress in the last year when it comes to getting games running on Macs -- titles like Resident Evil Village and a recent No Man's Sky port don't exactly make the Mac a gaming destination, but they're bigger releases than Mac users are normally accustomed to. For getting the vast majority of PC gaming titles running, though, the most promising solution would be a Steam Deck-esque software layer that translates Microsoft's DirectX 12 API into something compatible with Apple's proprietary Metal API. Preliminary support for that kind of translation will be coming to CodeWeavers' CrossOver software this summer, the company announced in a blog post late last week.

CrossOver is a software package that promises to run Windows apps and games under macOS and Linux without requiring a full virtualized (or emulated) Windows installation. Its developers announced that they were working on DirectX 12 support in late 2021, and now they have a sample screenshot of Diablo II Resurrected running on an Apple M2 chip. This early DirectX12 support will ship with CrossOver version 23 "later this summer." The announcement is simultaneously promising and caveat-filled; getting this single game running required fixing multiple game-specific bugs in upstream software projects. Support will need to be added on a game-by-game basis, at least at first.

"Our team's investigations concluded that there was no single magic key that unlocked DirectX 12 support on macOS," CodeWeavers project manager Meredith Johnson wrote in the blog post. "To get just Diablo II Resurrected running, we had to fix a multitude of bugs involving MoltenVK and SPIRV-Cross. We anticipate that this will be the case for other DirectX 12 games: we will need to add support on a per-title basis, and each game will likely involve multiple bugs." In other words, don't expect Steam Deck-esque levels of compatibility with Windows games just yet. There are also still gameplay bugs even in Diablo II Resurrected, though "the fact that it's running at all is a huge win."

Companies deploying generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard with the potential to generate disinformation should label such content as part of their efforts to combat fake news, European Commission deputy head Vera Jourova said on Monday. From a report: Unveiled late last year, Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history and set off a race among tech companies to bring generative AI products to market. Concerns however are mounting about potential abuse of the technology and the possibility that bad actors and even governments may use it to produce far more disinformation than before.

"Signatories who integrate generative AI into their services like Bingchat for Microsoft, Bard for Google should build in necessary safeguards that these services cannot be used by malicious actors to generate disinformation," Jourova told a press conference. "Signatories who have services with a potential to disseminate AI generated disinformation should in turn put in place technology to recognise such content and clearly label this to users," she said. Companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta Platforms that have signed up to the EU Code of Practice to tackle disinformation should report on safeguards put in place to tackle this in July, Jourova said.

Sony's chief executive has warned that cloud gaming is still technically "very tricky," playing down the risk to the console maker of the industry quickly converting to a technology on which its rival Microsoft has bet heavily. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times, Kenichiro Yoshida said the PlayStation creator would still study "various options" in the future for streaming games over the Internet itself, adding it could utilize GT Sophy, its artificial intelligence agent, to enhance cloud gaming. "I think cloud itself is an amazing business model, but when it comes to games, the technical difficulties are high," said Yoshida, citing latency -- the fast response times demanded by gamers -- as the biggest issue.

"So there will be challenges to cloud gaming, but we want to take on those challenges." Despite various attempts to remake the gaming industry around the cloud, many users have yet to switch from a console or high-end gaming PC to streaming games entirely over the Internet, fearing the lags that can be caused by slowing Internet connectivity and server speeds. Publishers have also not been fully supportive.

Google has taken a significant step toward a passwordless future with the start of an open beta for passkeys on Workspace accounts. From a report: Starting today, June 5th, over 9 million organizations can allow their users to sign in to a Google Workspace or Google Cloud account using a passkey instead of their usual passwords.

Passkeys are a new form of passwordless sign-in tech developed by the FIDO Alliance, whose members include industry giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Passkeys allow users to log in to websites and apps using their device's own authentication, such as a laptop with Windows Hello, an Android phone with a fingerprint sensor, or an iPhone with Face ID, instead of traditional passwords and other sign-in systems like 2FA or SMS verification. Because passkeys are based on public key cryptographic protocols, there's no fixed "sequence" that can be stolen or leaked in phishing attacks.

Bill Gates wrote a blog post this week recommending a novel about videogame development. Gates calls Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. "one of the biggest books of last year," telling the story of "two friends who bond over Super Mario Bros. as kids and grow up to make video games together." Although there are plenty of video games mentioned in the book — Oregon Trail is a recurring theme — I'd describe it more as a story about partnership and collaboration. When Sam and Sadie are in college, they create a game called Ichigo that turns out to be a huge hit. Their company, Unfair Games, becomes successful, but the two start to butt heads. Sadie is upset that Sam got most of the credit for Ichigo. Sam is frustrated that Sadie cares more about creating art than about making their company viable...

Most of the book is about how a creative partnership can be equal parts remarkable and complicated. I couldn't help but be reminded of my relationship with Paul Allen while I was reading it. Sadie believes that "true collaborators in this life are rare." I agree, and I was lucky to have one in Paul. An early chapter describing how Sam and Sadie worked until sunrise in a dingy apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, could have just as easily been about Paul and me coming up with the idea for Microsoft. Like Sam and Sadie, we worked together every day for years.

Paul's vision and contributions to the company were absolutely critical to its success, and then he chose to move on. We had a great relationship, but not without some of the complexities that success brings. Zevin really captures what it feels like to start a company that takes off. It's thrilling to know your vision is now real, but success brings a lot of new questions. Once you make money, do you still have something to prove? How does your relationship with your partner change once a lot more people get involved? How do you make the next idea as good as the last?

You can't help but wonder whether you would've been as successful if you started up at a different time... Paul and I were very lucky in terms of our timing with Microsoft. We got in when chips were just starting to become powerful but before other people had created established companies... Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow resonated with me for personal reasons, but I think Zevin's exploration of partnership and collaboration is worth reading no matter who you are. Even if you're skeptical about reading a book about video games, the subject is a terrific metaphor for human connection.
The book is now being adapted into a movie.

Windows Insiders in the Dev and Canary channels now have access to an updated version of MS Paint, featuring dark mode support and more granular zoom settings. The update also introduces a zoom slider in the lower-right corner of the app, a new Settings page, new keyboard shortcuts, and "many accessibility and usability improvements to dialogs throughout the app." Ars Technica reports: Paint's new dark mode is only subtly different from the version that Microsoft promised and pulled back in August 2021. If anything, the dark mode we're getting looks a little darker, and the app makes wider use of the "Mica" material that picks up a subtle color tint from your desktop wallpaper.

Updates to the Paint app are notable partly because the app went without updates for so long, and Microsoft even went so far as to announce the end of its development in 2017. The features that have been added to the app during the Windows 11 era have been relatively minor, all things considered, but minor updates are much better than the decade-plus of inactivity the app was subjected to before. Other longstanding built-in Windows apps like Notepad, Sound Recorder, and Media Player have gotten similar attention over the last two years.

In a support document today, Microsoft announced its ending support for Cortana on Windows in late 2023. "Cortana continues to live on in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Teams display, and Teams rooms," notes XDA Developers. From the report: In the support document announcing the end of the Cortana era, Microsoft notes that you'll still be able to access AI experiences in Windows 11, and calls out Windows Copilot by name. Alongside that, there's the new Bing, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and voice access in Windows, the last of which lets you control your PC with your voice.

The writing has been on the wall for Cortana for some time now. It was first introduced as a virtual assistant for Windows Phone 8.1, back in 2014, competing with the likes of Apple's Siri. In 2015, it launched on the desktop with Windows 10, and then it started to feel like Microsoft was putting Cortana everywhere. It started showing up in apps like Office and such, similar to what we're seeing with Copilot now. There were third-party Cortana devices too, like the Harman Kardon Invoke smart speaker and the Johnson Controls Glas thermostat, both of which are no longer supported.

Soon after it started becoming apparent that Cortana wouldn't compete with Amazon Alexa, Microsoft started to roll back. Cortana was stripped out of Windows, becoming a standalone app rather than something you found in the taskbar. For a couple of years now, it's just kind of lived as an app on Windows 11, with no news arriving about any kinds of new features. Now is the era of Bing Chat and Copilot.

Microsoft has warned investors about a "non-public" draft decision by Irish regulators against LinkedIn for allegedly dodgy ad data practices, explaining it had set aside some cash to pay off any potential fine. From a report: How much? Oh, a mere $425 million. The software giant said the funds were connected to a 2018 investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC) looking into whether LinkedIn's targeted advertising practices violated the the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At the time of the complaint, the 2016 law had been recently implemented and the watchdog was just settling into its role as EU overlord of judging data practices of the tech giants. Microsoft denies it broke any GDPR rules and said it "intends to defend itself vigorously in this matter."

Microsoft's massive investment in OpenAI has put the company at the center of the artificial intelligence boom. But it's not the only place where the software giant is opening its wallet to meet the surging demand for AI-powered services. From a report: CNBC has learned from people with knowledge of the matter that Microsoft has agreed to spend potentially billions of dollars over multiple years on cloud-computing infrastructure from startup CoreWeave, which announced on Wednesday that it raised $200 million. That financing comes just over a month after the company attained a valuation of $2 billion. CoreWeave sells simplified access to Nvidia's graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are considered the best available on the market for running AI models.

Microsoft signed the CoreWeave deal earlier this year in order to ensure that OpenAI, which operates the viral ChatGPT chatbot, will have adequate computing power going forward, said one of the people, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. OpenAI relies on Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure for its hefty compute needs.