Google is very publicly adding to the chorus of complaints about Microsoft's alleged restrictive cloud software licensing policies, claiming that unless the European Union formally tackles it, the industry and customers will suffer lasting damage. From a report: Amit Zavery, vice president, general manager, and head of platform at Google Cloud, says antitrust regulators are "starting to understand the situation" and are asking questions. "Any enterprise company will be impacted negatively if things are not resolved properly," he told The Register. "I think there should be appetite [from the regulators] and I think there should be movement in that area to really put some kind of checks and balances on Microsoft's policies." One bone of contention for Google, the third-largest public cloud provider globally and in Europe, is that it simply costs more to run Microsoft software on third-party providers' clouds. This is due to extra licensing costs levied by Microsoft when you run its applications on non-Microsoft clouds, we're told. "Microsoft publicly touts that if you run their software on Azure versus other vendors like AWS and GCP, it's five times cheaper or it's more expensive to run on us 5x basically because of the tax customers have to pay to Microsoft," Zavery told us.

Brave has launched its Brave Search API, allowing third parties to integrate its privacy-preserving and ad-free search results into their applications through a simple API call. Thurrott reports: Brave notes that its Search API is inexpensive and that it's a great fit for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models developers in particular because it provides access to a collection of high-quality, Web-scale data including recent events. Brave claims that its standalone Brave Search offering now delivers over 8 billion annualized queries, which makes it the fastest-growing search engine since Microsoft Bing. And in sharp contrast to the market leaders, Brave Search is private and transparent. Plus, it's fueled by opt-in users of the Brave browser's Web Discovery Project, which adds millions of new web pages to the index every single day and keeps it current and fresh. The Brave web browser has over 60 million active users now, the company adds.

A free version of the Brave Search API provides one search query per second and up to 2,000 queries per month. Paid tiers start at $3 CPM (cost per one thousand) for 20 queries per second and up to 20 million queries per month, with access to web search, Goggles, news cluster, and videos cluster, plus added cost access to autosuggest and spellcheck at $5 per 10,000 requests. Higher-price tiers add more queries per second and per month, plus additional capabilities like schema-enriched web results, infobox, FAQ, discussions, locations, and more.

Nvidia on Tuesday became the first chipmaker to join the trillion-dollar club, as the company bets on a surge in demand for its AI chips that power chatbot sensation ChatGPT and many other applications. From a report: The gaming and AI chip company's shares rose 4.2%. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co is the next largest chipmaker globally, valued at about $535 billion. Meta Platforms, valued at about $670 billion as of last close, clinched the trillion-dollar market capitalization milestone in 2021, while Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon are the other U.S. companies that are part of the club.

Microsoft's annual developer event Build 2023 unveiled ChatGPT's integration into Bing and an AI 'personal assistant' for Windows 11.

But Windows Central also notes two more big (non-AI) announcements: Windows 11 is getting cloud-powered OS backup and restore Smartphone owners have long enjoyed a similar functionality, where you could buy a new device and upon the first start, simply log in to your platform account and select "Restore my apps" from the cloud backup. And now Windows will be able to do the same. ["If the user chooses yes, Windows will automatically apply the old wallpaper and settings and even begin preloading apps you had installed on your old PC. Once the user hits the desktop, they'll see all their previously pinned apps already in the Taskbar, and clicking on them will initiate an automatic download from the Microsoft Store."]

Windows 11 on ARM devices gets a big boost [B]ecause Microsoft has no intention of dropping x86 support, they have been slow in adopting ARM architecture to make it a viable alternative for Windows users. With Build 2023, this is moving ahead...
Elsewhere Windows Central argues that "should result in a better experience on devices like the Surface Pro 9 (ARM), Surface Pro X, and the new Dell Inspiron 14 with a Snapdragon 8cx 2 processor.

On the gaming side of things, Unity with native Windows on ARM support will become available in early June. Once launched, the tool will let developers target Windows on ARM devices for current and future games, resulting in better performance. Unity is a very popular development platform for games, and native support for Windows on ARM is a welcome addition...

Visual Studio having Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) support for Arm will give developers another way to target Windows on ARM PCs.
Even Node.js v20.0.0 now officially supports ARM64 Windows, "allowing for native execution on the platform. The MSI, zip/7z packages, and executable are available from the Node.js download site along with all other platforms."

And in addition, Visual Studio 17.71 Preview 1 now ships with support for Linux development with C++.

Liam Proven, reporting for The Register: Over 21 years after it first came out, the Microsoft operating system that will not die is receiving another lease of life. It's possible to activate new installations, safely and securely, without a crack, off line. A blog post on tinyapps has revealed the hot news that nobody sane has been waiting for: the algorithm that Microsoft uses to validate Windows XP product keys has been cracked and reimplemented. As a result it's now possible to generate valid activation codes for Windows XP, without an internet connection, even though Microsoft has turned off all the activation servers.

This is not a recommendation But first, a word of caution and restraint. Please don't take this article as a recommendation to run Windows XP. It wasn't the most secure of operating systems back in 2001, and you really should not be running it in 2023 -- especially not on anything that is connected to the internet. However, saying that, the problem is that sometimes people need to. There is, for example, hardware out there that only works with Windows XP and won't work with anything newer... and some of it might be very expensive hardware, which is still perfectly functional -- but which requires a long-obsolete version of Windows to operate it. If you are lumbered with such a device, or you have got some single specific and very particular piece of software that you need to run and which doesn't work properly on any newer version of Windows, then you may be forced to use XP. If so, one of the problems is that Microsoft has turned off the activation servers, so even if you install clean fresh copy, you can no longer activate it over the Internet. (Allegedly, the telephone activation service still works, if that's an option for you.)

Microsoft President Brad Smith said Thursday that his biggest concern around artificial intelligence was deep fakes, realistic looking but false content. From a report: In a speech in Washington aimed at addressing the issue of how best to regulate AI, which went from wonky to widespread with the arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Smith called for steps to ensure that people know when a photo or video is real and when it is generated by AI, potentially for nefarious purposes. "We're going have to address the issues around deep fakes. We're going to have to address in particular what we worry about most foreign cyber influence operations, the kinds of activities that are already taking place by the Russian government, the Chinese, the Iranians," he said.

"We need to take steps to protect against the alteration of legitimate content with an intent to deceive or defraud people through the use of AI." Smith also called for licensing for the most critical forms of AI with "obligations to protect security, physical security, cybersecurity, national security." "We will need a new generation of export controls, at least the evolution of the export controls we have, to ensure that these models are not stolen or not used in ways that would violate the country's export control requirements," he said. For weeks, lawmakers in Washington have struggled with what laws to pass to control AI even as companies large and small have raced to bring increasingly versatile AI to market.

At its Build 2023 conference this week, Microsoft announced Windows 11 will soon be able to run Win32 apps in isolation mode. XDA Developers reports: Starting [today], Microsoft is launching a preview of Win32 apps in isolation for Windows 11 customers. As the name suggests, it will allow users to run Win32 apps in an isolated environment so that they can be sandboxed from the rest of the operating system in order to further strengthen security. The idea is to leverage Windows 11's isolation capabilities to run Win32 apps in an environment where they don't have access to critical Windows components and subsystems. This will ensure that if someone runs a compromised Win32 app in isolation, it will be very difficult for an attacker to break through the sandbox and penetrate the rest of the system. This capability will be available in public preview for both enterprise customers and consumers.

Microsoft has issued a warning that Chinese state-sponsored hackers, known as "Volt Typhoon," have compromised "critical" U.S. cyber infrastructure across various industries with a focus on gathering intelligence. CNBC reports: The Chinese hacking group, codenamed "Volt Typhoon," has operated since mid-2021, Microsoft said in an advisory. The organization is apparently working to disrupt "critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia," Microsoft said, to stymie efforts during "future crises." The National Security Agency put out a bulletin (PDF) on Wednesday, detailing how the hack works and how cybersecurity teams should respond.

The attack is apparently ongoing. In an advisory, Microsoft urged impacted customers to "close or change credentials for all compromised accounts." U.S. intelligence agencies became aware of the incursion in February, around the same time that a Chinese spy balloon was downed, the New York Times reported. The infiltration was focused on communications infrastructure in Guam and other parts of the U.S., the Times reported, and was particularly alarming to U.S. intelligence because Guam sits at the heart of an American military response in case of a Taiwanese invasion.

Volt Typhoon is able to infiltrate organizations using a unnamed vulnerability in a popular cybersecurity suite called FortiGuard, Microsoft said. Once the hacking group has gained access to a corporate system, it steals user credentials from the security suite and uses them to try to gain access to other corporate systems. The state-sponsored hackers aren't looking to create disruption yet, Microsoft said. Rather, "the threat actor intends to perform espionage and maintain access without being detected for as long as possible." Infrastructure in nearly every critical sector has been impacted, Microsoft said, including the communications, transport, and maritime industries. Government organizations were also targeted.

Amazon's cloud customers are clamoring to get their hands on the ChatGPT-style technology the company unveiled six weeks ago. But instead of being allowed to test it, many are being told to sit tight, prompting concerns the artificial intelligence tool isn't fully baked. From a report: Amazon's announcement that it had entered the generative AI race was uncharacteristically vague, according to longtime employees and customers. Amazon Web Services product launches typically include glowing testimonials from three to five customers, these people said. This time the company cited just one: Coda, a document-editing startup.

Coda Chief Executive Officer Shishir Mehrotra said that after testing the technology he awarded Amazon an "incomplete" grade. The company's generative AI tools are "all fairly early," he said in an interview. "They're building on and repackaging services that they already offered." Mehrotra added that he expected AWS's AI tools to be competitive long-term. People familiar with AWS product launches wondered if Amazon released the AI tools to counter perceptions it has fallen behind cloud rivals Microsoft and Alphabet's Google. Both companies are using generative AI -- which mines vast quantities of data to generate text or images -- to revamp web search and add AI capabilities to a host of products. The technology is unrefined and error-prone, but no one denies its potential to revolutionize computing.

Microsoft's ARM-based Surface Pro X tablet is not having a good time, and neither are its owners. From a report: According to multiple reports, the tablet's cameras stopped working out of the blue, showing a cryptic error when trying to launch the Windows Camera app or other software: "Something went wrong. If you need it, here's the error code: 0xA00F4271 (0x80004005)."

The first thing that comes to the user's mind when experiencing issues like this is reinstalling the corresponding driver. However, this is not true with Surface Pro X's botched cameras. Affected customers say removing and installing camera drivers on the Surface Pro X has no effect and leaves them stranded, unable to join video calls, take pictures, and perform other camera-related tasks. More importantly, the bug also breaks facial recognition, forcing customers to use their PIN codes instead.

Employees of the Chinese-owned video app TikTok have regularly posted user information on a messaging and collaboration tool called Lark, according to internal documents. The New York Times: In August 2021, TikTok received a complaint from a British user, who flagged that a man had been "exposing himself and playing with himself" on a livestream she hosted on the video app. She also described past abuse she had experienced. To address the complaint, TikTok employees shared the incident on an internal messaging and collaboration tool called Lark, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. The British woman's personal data -- including her photo, country of residence, internet protocol address, device and user IDs -- were also posted on the platform, which is similar to Slack and Microsoft Teams. Her information was just one piece of TikTok user data shared on Lark, which is used every day by thousands of employees of the app's Chinese owner, ByteDance, including by those in China.

According to the documents obtained by The Times, the driver's licenses of American users were also accessible on the platform, as were some users' potentially illegal content, such as child sexual abuse materials. In many cases, the information was available in Lark "groups" -- essentially chat rooms of employees -- with thousands of members. The profusion of user data on Lark alarmed some TikTok employees, especially since ByteDance workers in China and elsewhere could easily see the material, according to internal reports and four current and former employees. Since at least July 2021, several security employees have warned ByteDance and TikTok executives about risks tied to the platform, according to the documents and the current and former workers. "Should Beijing-based employees be owners of groups that contain secret" data of users, one TikTok employee asked in an internal report last July. The user materials on Lark raise questions about TikTok's data and privacy practices and show how intertwined it is with ByteDance, just as the video app faces mounting scrutiny over its potential security risks and ties to China.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Merely months have passed since Microsoft and OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the world, sparking a fervor among tech enthusiasts and industry titans. Now, the technology that underpins this generative AI is breaking barriers, reaching remote hamlets hundreds of miles away from the tech hubbubs of Seattle and San Francisco. Jugalbandi, a chatbot built in collaboration by Microsoft, the open-source initiative OpenNyAI, and AI4Bharat, backed by the Indian government, is showing signs of progress in redefining information access for villagers in India, offering insights into more than 170 government programs in 10 indigenous languages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes the future top company in artificial intelligence will likely have created a personal digital agent that can perform certain tasks for people. The technology will be so profound, it could radically alter user behaviors. "Whoever wins the personal agent, that's the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you'll never go to Amazon again," he said.

This yet-to-be developed AI assistant will be able to understand a person's needs and habits and will help them "read the stuff you don't have time to read," Gates said Monday during a Goldman Sachs and SV Angel event in San Francisco on the topic of artificial intelligence. Gates said there is a 50-50 chance that this future AI winner will be either a startup or a tech giant. "I'd be disappointed if Microsoft didn't come in there," Gates said. "But I'm impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection," he added referring to Inflection.AI, co-founded by former DeepMind executive Mustafa Suleyman.

It will take some time until this powerful future digital agent is ready for mainstream use, Gates said. Until then, companies will continue embedding so-called generative AI technologies akin to OpenAI's popular ChatGPT into their own products. [...] He also likened the rise of generative AI technologies that can produce compelling text as a game-changer that will affect white-collar workers. Gates added that he believes that future humanoid robots that are cheaper for companies to use than human employees will greatly impact blue-collar workers, too. "As we invent these robots, we just need to make sure they don't get Alzheimer's," Gates said in jest.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Then, at some point, someone at Microsoft must have gotten fed up with rushing their .rar operations the way I have for 20 years and thought, there must be a better way. And so, under the subheading of "Reducing toil," we have a few helpful UI updates, then casually and apropos of nothing, this:

"In addition... We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows."

Microsoft is adding a Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11. Much like the Copilot sidebars we've seen in Edge, Office apps, and even GitHub, Windows Copilot will be integrated directly into Windows 11 and available to open and use from the taskbar across all apps and programs. From a report: "Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs, and windows, always available to act as your personal assistant," explains Panos Panay, Microsoft's head of Windows and devices. "It makes every user a power user, helping you take action, customize your settings, and seamlessly connect across your favorite apps."

The Windows Copilot can summarize content you're viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. It looks very similar to the dialog box that's found in Bing Chat, so you can ask it general questions and things you might usually ask a search engine. It won't directly replace the search bar on the Windows 11 taskbar and is a separate Copilot button alongside it instead, much like how Cortana had its own dedicated space on the taskbar in Windows 10. Windows Copilot is a "personal assistant," according to Microsoft, which sounds a lot like how Microsoft described Cortana as a "personal productivity assistant."

ChatGPT no longer needs to rely on its own models or plugins to provide information to users: Microsoft has announced Bing Search is integrating into ChatGPT to provide more relevant -- and potentially newer -- responses. From a report: Bing will act as the "default search experience," allowing ChatGPT to pull answers from the internet and provide citations. Microsoft and OpenAI have worked together closely over the last few months, with Bing, itself, running on GPT-4 (with some tailoring for searches). Bing works by displaying responses in detailed or summary form and sources facts and suggestions with footnotes of sorts -- features it can bring to ChatGPT to, possibly, provide more precise information. Previously, ChatGPT relied solely on individual plugins to access any recent information.

When Bill Gates took the stage at Stanford back in 1996, he was ready with his first joke after a long round of appreciative applause. "Maybe I dropped out of the wrong college."

But Bill Gates still cares about education. In 2019, a Gates Foundation commission even suggested valuing colleges by their affordability and accessibility, as well as the improvements they provide to economic mobility. And by those metrics, Gates writes on his blog, an emerging leader is Northern Arizona University (or NAU).


- Beginning this fall, an NAU program will make tuition free for students with family incomes below the state's median of $65,000.

- Half its students are first-generation college students.

- NAU recently launched a universal admissions program, "which redirects applicants who would have been denied entry to instead apply to community college," Gates writes. "From there, students are guaranteed subsequent admission to NAU as a transfer..."

- NAU has secured millions in scholarships and advising services for community college students planning to transfer to NAU.


So last weekend, Bill Gates delivered the commencement speech at Northern Arizona University, for graduates of its College of Engineering, Informatics, and Applied Sciences and College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences. "You are graduating from an institution that creates opportunity, fosters innovation, and builds community, and it has prepared you to find solutions to some of the biggest problems facing us today," Gates told the audience.

Then he added "NAU is also giving you something I never received: A real college degree." Some of you might know that I never made it to my own graduation. I left after three semesters to start Microsoft. So, what does a college dropout know about graduation? Not much personally, to be honest.

As I prepared for today, I thought about how you, as new graduates, can have the biggest impact on the world with the education you received here. That led me to thinking about the graduation I never had, the commencement speech I never heard, and the advice I wasn't given on a day just like this one.

That is what I want to share with you this afternoon: The five things I wish I was told at the graduation I never attended.
Gates suggested the graduates seek careers solving the world's important problems. ("Some of you are heading off to start careers as programmers. You could use your talents to make sure all people can benefit from artificial intelligence — or to help eliminate biases in AI.") He ended his speech by telling the students "you will be the ones to solve the climate crisis and reduce the gap between the rich and poor."

But Gates also told the students not to be afraid to change their mind or their careers — and to be willing to admit they don't know everything. "Just about everything I have accomplished came because I sought out others who knew more. People want to help you. The key is to not be afraid to ask."
My fourth piece of advice is simple: Don't underestimate the power of friendship. When I was in school, I became friends with another student who shared a lot of my interests, like science fiction novels and computer magazines. Little did I know how important that friendship would be. My friend's name was Paul Allen — and we started Microsoft together...

The only thing more valuable than what you walk offstage with today is who you walk onstage with.

It's an educational pocket-sized codable computer with a motion detector, compass, and other sensors. Wikipedia describes the micro:bit as "half the size of a credit card" -- (43 mm x 52 mm or 1.7 inches by 2.0 inches).

Now long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: If British schoolchildren aren't inspired to code by the tiny 5x5 grid of LED lights on the micro:bit single-board computer, well it's not for lack of trying. The BBC on Monday announced a partnership with Microsoft, Arm, and others that will offer a classroom set of 30 free handheld BBC micro:bits (about 700,000 total devices) and brand-new teaching resources to every primary school across the UK "to support all schoolchildren and teachers..."

The news follows January's announcement of the Micro:bit Educational Foundation's newest partnership. They teamed with US-based/tech giant-backed nonprofit Code.org to offer teachers computing resources to incorporate the micro:bit in Code.org's CS Fundamentals curriculum (aimed at children in Kindergarten-5th Grade).

Microsoft is a Founding Partner of both the Micro:bit Educational Foundation and Code.org, and back in 2015 Microsoft also partnered with the BBC to provide an estimated 1 million free micro:bits to every 11- and 12-year old in the UK. A 2017 research paper reported that after testing with 15 teachers, "primarily comments around engagement were positive." But one skeptical teacher offered some doubts about the appeal of a small relatively low-tech device to younger children. "I mean I think it's cute but I could easily see why you know a 4K mobile phone screen is going to hold more appeal than regular LEDs ... I think there is merit in that but I could see how people would understandably go where's the screen?"

"I keep reading and hearing about calls for regulations on artificial intelligence," writes long-time Slashdot reader bartoku , "and it pisses me off."

"I want more so called artificial intelligence, not less, and I do not want it to be regulated, filtered, restricted in anyway." I love that Deep Fakes are now available to the masses, and I stopped believing anything is real in 1997 after Hoffman and De Niro scared me in " Wag the Dog".

I love automation and I want more of it; robots please take my job. I want robots to go fight wars for me instead of our sons.

Surveillance is already terrifying, adding "Artificial Intelligence" does not really make it that much more scary; we all need to just starve the system of our personal data anyway. All the other arguments like crashing economic systems and discrimination just seemed to be based on stupid "Artificial Intelligence" hooked up to something it should not be...

Please scare me, or vote on your favorite sci-fi "Artificial Intelligence" scenario. I will be being boring and hope we can have a "good" Matrix; one where I am rich and sexy.
The original submission notes that they posed this question to ChatGPT — and to Google — but "I did not get a single compelling answer."

So share your own thoughts in the comments: why should this Slashdot user be afraid of AI?

NOTE: Though they didn't feel it conveyed the right tone, they also submitted their original post to Microsoft's Bing AI, which delivered this rewrite:

What are the real dangers of artificial intelligence? I am not convinced by the common arguments against it, such as regulation, deep fakes, automation, war, surveillance, economic disruption, or discrimination. I think these are either exaggerated or solvable problems. I actually want more artificial intelligence in my life, not less. Can you give me some compelling reasons why I should be afraid of artificial intelligence? Or what are some sci-fi scenarios that you find plausible or interesting? Personally, I would like a Matrix-like simulation where I can live out my fantasies.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Meta is building its first custom chip specifically for running AI models, the company announced on Thursday. As Meta increases its AI efforts — CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful" — the chip and other infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could be critical tools for Meta to compete with other tech giants also investing significant resources into AI.

Meta's new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, is its "in-house, custom accelerator chip family targeting inference workloads," Meta VP and head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan wrote in a blog post... But the MTIA chip is seemingly a long ways away: it's not set to come out until 2025, TechCrunch reports.
Meta has been working on "a massive project to upgrade its AI infrastructure in the past year," Reuters reports, "after executives realized it lacked the hardware and software to support demand from product teams building AI-powered features."

As a result, the company scrapped plans for a large-scale rollout of an in-house inference chip and started work on a more ambitious chip capable of performing training and inference, Reuters reported...

Meta said it has an AI-powered system to help its engineers create computer code, similar to tools offered by Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.
TechCrunch calls these announcements "an attempt at a projection of strength from Meta, which historically has been slow to adopt AI-friendly hardware systems — hobbling its ability to keep pace with rivals such as Google and Microsoft."

Meta's VP of Infrastructure told TechCrunch "This level of vertical integration is needed to push the boundaries of AI research at scale." Over the past decade or so, Meta has spent billions of dollars recruiting top data scientists and building new kinds of AI, including AI that now powers the discovery engines, moderation filters and ad recommenders found throughout its apps and services. But the company has struggled to turn many of its more ambitious AI research innovations into products, particularly on the generative AI front. Until 2022, Meta largely ran its AI workloads using a combination of CPUs — which tend to be less efficient for those sorts of tasks than GPUs — and a custom chip designed for accelerating AI algorithms...

The MTIA is an ASIC, a kind of chip that combines different circuits on one board, allowing it to be programmed to carry out one or many tasks in parallel... Custom AI chips are increasingly the name of the game among the Big Tech players. Google created a processor, the TPU (short for "tensor processing unit"), to train large generative AI systems like PaLM-2 and Imagen. Amazon offers proprietary chips to AWS customers both for training (Trainium) and inferencing (Inferentia). And Microsoft, reportedly, is working with AMD to develop an in-house AI chip called Athena.

Meta says that it created the first generation of the MTIA — MTIA v1 — in 2020, built on a 7-nanometer process. It can scale beyond its internal 128 MB of memory to up to 128 GB, and in a Meta-designed benchmark test — which, of course, has to be taken with a grain of salt — Meta claims that the MTIA handled "low-complexity" and "medium-complexity" AI models more efficiently than a GPU. Work remains to be done in the memory and networking areas of the chip, Meta says, which present bottlenecks as the size of AI models grow, requiring workloads to be split up across several chips. (Not coincidentally, Meta recently acquired an Oslo-based team building AI networking tech at British chip unicorn Graphcore.) And for now, the MTIA's focus is strictly on inference — not training — for "recommendation workloads" across Meta's app family...

If there's a common thread in today's hardware announcements, it's that Meta's attempting desperately to pick up the pace where it concerns AI, specifically generative AI... In part, Meta's feeling increasing pressure from investors concerned that the company's not moving fast enough to capture the (potentially large) market for generative AI. It has no answer — yet — to chatbots like Bard, Bing Chat or ChatGPT. Nor has it made much progress on image generation, another key segment that's seen explosive growth.

If the predictions are right, the total addressable market for generative AI software could be $150 billion. Goldman Sachs predicts that it'll raise GDP by 7%. Even a small slice of that could erase the billions Meta's lost in investments in "metaverse" technologies like augmented reality headsets, meetings software and VR playgrounds like Horizon Worlds.