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      Microsoft’s heavy bet on AI pays off as it beats expectations in second quarter

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 20:19


    World’s largest public company reports $61.86bn revenue after investing billions into artificial intelligence

    Profits at Microsoft beat Wall Street’s expectations as its heavy bets on artificial intelligence and gaming continued to bear fruit in the second quarter.

    The technology giant has invested billions of dollars into AI in a bid to turbocharge its growth.

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      Qualcomm says lower-end Snapdragon X Plus chips can still outrun Apple’s M3

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 12:26 · 1 minute

    Qualcomm says lower-end Snapdragon X Plus chips can still outrun Apple’s M3

    Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

    Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series of chips promises to be the company’s first that can go toe-to-toe with Apple Silicon, and the PC ecosystem is reacting accordingly . Microsoft reportedly plans for the Arm version of its next Surface tablet to be the flagship, and major apps like Chrome and Dropbox have recently released Arm-native Windows versions for the first time.

    Ahead of the chips' launch late this year, Qualcomm announced a new lower-end model destined for cheaper devices. Dubbed the Snapdragon X Plus, it shares a lot in common with the flagship Snapdragon X Elite .

    The Snapdragon X Plus includes 10 CPU cores instead of the Elite’s 12, though the more noticeable change is its lack of support for clock-speed boosting; the chip’s 3.4 GHz base frequency is as fast as it goes, where the Elite chips can boost two cores to 4.2 GHz and one core up to 4.3 GHz, depending on the specific model. Qualcomm also rates the X Plus’ integrated GPU at 3.8 TFLOPs, down from the X Elite’s maximum of 4.6 TFLOPs. Aside from those high-level FLOP numbers, we still know very little about how the GPU will be configured; we also don’t know the ratio of “big” and “little” CPU cores.

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      Microsoft’s Phi-3 shows the surprising power of small, locally run AI language models

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 2 days ago - 20:47

    An illustration of lots of information being compressed into a smartphone with a funnel.

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a new, freely available lightweight AI language model named Phi-3-mini, which is simpler and less expensive to operate than traditional large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo . Its small size is ideal for running locally, which could bring an AI model of similar capability to the free version of ChatGPT to a smartphone without needing an Internet connection to run it.

    The AI field typically measures AI language model size by parameter count. Parameters are numerical values in a neural network that determine how the language model processes and generates text. They are learned during training on large datasets and essentially encode the model's knowledge into quantified form. More parameters generally allow the model to capture more nuanced and complex language-generation capabilities but also require more computational resources to train and run.

    Some of the largest language models today, like Google's PaLM 2 , have hundreds of billions of parameters. OpenAI's GPT-4 is rumored to have over a trillion parameters but spread over eight 220-billion parameter models in a mixture-of-experts configuration. Both models require heavy-duty data center GPUs (and supporting systems) to run properly.

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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · 2 days ago - 15:53 edit

    Microsoft has launched Phi-3 Mini, a lightweight AI model with 3.8 billion parameters, as part of its plan to release three small models. Phi-3 Mini, trained on a smaller data set compared to large language models, is available on Azure, Hugging Face, and Ollama. Microsoft claims Phi-3 Mini performs as well as models 10 times its size, offering capabilities similar to GPT-3.5 in a smaller form factor. Smaller AI models are more cost-effective and perform better on personal devices.

    Read more of this story at Slashdot.

    Microsoft Launches Phi-3 Mini, a 3.8B-Parameter Model Rivaling GPT-3.5 Capabilities
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      slashdot.org /story/24/04/23/1433204/microsoft-launches-phi-3-mini-a-38b-parameter-model-rivaling-gpt-35-capabilities

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      Xbox va lancer un casque VR, mais PlayStation peut dormir sur ses deux oreilles

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · 2 days ago - 09:04

    Depuis plusieurs années, la rumeur d'un casque Xbox VR circule. Microsoft, comme Sony, va-t-il se mettre aux jeux immersifs ? L'entreprise va bel et bien lancer un casque de réalité virtuelle, mais avec des ambitions très différentes.

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      Microsoft and Security Incentives

      news.movim.eu / Schneier · 2 days ago - 02:51

    Former senior White House cyber policy director A. J. Grotto talks about the economic incentives for companies to improve their security—in particular, Microsoft:

    Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and given the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best.

    […]

    “The government needs to focus on encouraging and catalyzing competition,” Grotto said. He believes it also needs to publicly scrutinize Microsoft and make sure everyone knows when it messes up.

    “At the end of the day, Microsoft, any company, is going to respond most directly to market incentives,” Grotto told us. “Unless this scrutiny generates changed behavior among its customers who might want to look elsewhere, then the incentives for Microsoft to change are not going to be as strong as they should be.”

    Breaking up the tech monopolies is one of the best things we can do for cybersecurity.

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      Windows vulnerability reported by the NSA exploited to install Russian backdoor

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 3 days ago - 20:36

    Kremlin-backed hackers exploit critical Windows vulnerability reported by the NSA

    Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

    Kremlin-backed hackers have been exploiting a critical Microsoft vulnerability for four years in attacks that targeted a vast array of organizations with a previously undocumented backdoor, the software maker disclosed Monday.

    When Microsoft patched the vulnerability in October 2022—at least two years after it came under attack by the Russian hackers—the company made no mention that it was under active exploitation. As of publication, the company’s advisory still made no mention of the in-the-wild targeting. Windows users frequently prioritize the installation of patches based on whether a vulnerability is likely to be exploited in real-world attacks.

    Exploiting CVE-2022-38028, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to gain system privileges, the highest available in Windows, when combined with a separate exploit. Exploiting the flaw, which carries a 7.8 severity rating out of a possible 10, requires low existing privileges and little complexity. It resides in the Windows print spooler, a printer-management component that has harbored previous critical zero-days . Microsoft said at the time that it learned of the vulnerability from the US National Security Agency.

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