Microsoft turns 50
Elon Musk’s xAI merges with X
DeepMind slows research releases to keep competitive edge in AI race
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Perplexity AI CEO's plan to take on Google
On April 4, 1975, two young visionaries, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, set out to do something bold: build a software company for the nascent world of personal computing. Their vision? A computer on every desk and in every home. For any founder, Microsoft’s early story is a powerful reminder: A bold, clear vision—paired with a relentless focus on scale and accessibility—can define not just a company, but a category. Great companies don’t just build for today; they build the conditions for global adoption tomorrow.Over its 50 years, Microsoft has ridden (and sometimes rebuilt itself for) four major technology platform shifts:
Client/server
Internet/mobile
Cloud
AI
Not every wave went smoothly—and Microsoft’s strength has often been in how it responded, not how it started. We were late to the internet, with Netscape capturing early mindshare, but we moved quickly to shape the web era with Internet Explorer. In mobile, we missed the mark. In cloud, we started a little later—but today, we lead. And in AI, we were ahead of the curve from the start in terms of our direct investments combined with the path-breaking partnership with OpenAI. Across all these shifts, one trait has been essential: a willingness to learn, adapt, and build again and not just rest on the laurels.
That early belief in the future of AI has since translated into tangible leadership—from GitHub Copilot to Microsoft 365 Copilot to Azure’s position as the go-to platform for building and running AI workloads and onward into the AI agentic world both for enterprises and for consumers. What started as a cultural reset has become a blueprint for enduring relevance—a company-wide engine of innovation that’s allowed Microsoft to not only keep pace but lead.We are now firmly in the AI era—the fourth major wave. What excites me most isn’t just the technology but the potential. The ability to boost global productivity, expand access to intelligence, and reshape the way we build, learn, and create. “The world will need more compute.” But he explained that where the real enterprise value accrues—whether in infrastructure, models, or applications—is still being figured out. And we are still very early....
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Elon Musk’s xAI merges with X
Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI has acquired X, the social-media platform he also owns, in an all-stock transaction that fuses two of the billionaire’s biggest technology bets and assigns the new enterprise a lofty value. The deal combines a Musk-controlled AI company racing to create powerful new tools that could transform the economy, with a social-media platform that holds a fire hose of chatter from around the globe. X can serve as a powerful distribution tool for xAI’s products, including its AI chatbot Grok, and provide a valuable feed of real-time data to power the startup’s models.
Prior to the acquisition, xAI and X had shared some resources, and in xAI’s early days its employees worked out of X’s San Francisco office. xAI has also leased graphic processing units, or GPUs, from X. Musk launched xAI two years ago with the goal of creating a rival to OpenAI, the nonprofit research lab behind ChatGPT. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before souring on its leadership. xAI’s first product, Grok, was initially made available only via X and only with a subscription to the social media service, which provided distribution for the late entrant to the space....
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DeepMind slows research releases to keep competitive edge in AI race
Google’s artificial intelligence arm DeepMind has been holding back the release of its world-renowned research, as it seeks to retain a competitive edge in the race to dominate the burgeoning AI industry. The group, led by Nobel Prize winner Sir Demis Hassabis, has introduced a tougher vetting process and more bureaucracy that made it harder to publish studies about its work on AI, according to seven current and former research scientists at Google DeepMind. Three former researchers said the group was most reluctant to share papers that reveal innovations that could be exploited by competitors.
The changes represent a significant shift for DeepMind, which has long prided itself on its reputation for releasing groundbreaking papers and as a home for the best scientists building AI. Among the changes in the company’s publication policies is a six-month embargo before “strategic” papers related to generative AI are released. A person close to DeepMind said the changes were to benefit researchers who had become frustrated spending time on work that would not be approved for strategic or competitive reasons. They added that the company still publishes hundreds of papers each year and is among the largest contributors to major AI conferences. Concern that Google was falling behind in the AI race contributed to the merger of London-based DeepMind and California-based Brain AI units in 2023. Since then, it has been faster to roll out a wide array of AI-infused products....
Enjoy! SBalley Team