Microsoft developing version of AI Copilot for the Pentagon, BI reports
Microsoft (MSFT) is working on a version of its 365 Copilot AI tool for the Pentagon, Business Insider's Ashley Stewart reports. 'For DoD environments, Microsoft 365 Copilot is expected to become available no earlier than summer 2025,' the company stated in a recent blog written for government customers. 'Work is ongoing to ensure the offering meets the necessary security and compliance standards.'
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New York Times
3 hours ago
- New York Times
Meta Invests Nearly $15 Billion in Scale AI to Kick-Start Superintelligence Lab
Meta said on Thursday that it planned to invest nearly $15 billion in Scale AI, a start-up that works with data to train artificial intelligence systems, in a deal that Meta hopes will add needed muscle to its disappointing A.I. division. As a condition of the deal, Alexandr Wang, Scale AI's 28-year-old chief executive, plans to join Meta in a top leadership role in the new division, which Meta is calling its Superintelligence lab. Mr. Wang, whom people inside Meta have taken to calling a visionary leader, will also bring a team of employees from Scale AI to work at Meta. The move to invest billions in Scale AI, an amount equal to about 10 percent of Meta's revenue in 2024, would be Meta's first major minority investment in an outside company. It is Meta's second-largest deal, after the $19 billion acquisition of the messaging app WhatsApp about 11 years ago. Meta is scrambling to catch up with A.I. competitors such as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, as industry executives jockey for an edge in what they believe will be the most transformative technology in a generation. 'Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI,' a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement. 'As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for A.I. models, and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts.' Meta's investment with Scale AI is unusually structured. Meta will take a minority stake in the start-up and receive little control over its direction. The structure was intentional. Executives at Meta and Scale AI were worried about drawing the attention of regulators. Meta is waiting on a federal judge's decision in an antitrust case scrutinizing its earlier acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The Federal Trade Commission under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was skeptical of big technology acquisitions, and Lina Khan, who led the agency at the time, scrutinized multibillion-dollar investments in A.I. companies. The structure of those deals — which included Amazon's investments in Anthropic and Microsoft's backing of OpenAI — allowed the big companies to form close ties with smaller rivals while dodging regulatory issues. It is unclear if the F.T.C. under its new chairman, Andrew Ferguson, will continue down that path. But Mr. Ferguson has shown few signs of changing course. OpenAI kicked off the A.I. movement in late 2022 with the release of its chatbot ChatGPT, compelling companies like Google and Meta to build similar technologies. Meta found an important niche when it chose to open source its systems, freely sharing the underlying tech with developers and businesses. But its latest system, called LLAMA4, has not matched the technologies produced by its biggest rivals. Among technologists, superintelligence is a futuristic goal of A.I. development. OpenAI, Google and others have said their immediate aim is to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. Superintelligence, if it can be developed, would go beyond A.G.I.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
I spoke with Arm about PC gaming and was told that Windows software compatibility is 'largely a solved problem'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Last week, I got the chance to speak to Chris Bergey, Senior VP and General Manager for the Client side of Arm Holdings, and after picking his brain about Windows on Arm for PC gaming, I'm carefully optimistic about the future. Emphasis on carefully, though, because the proof will ultimately be in the pudding (or rather, in the eating of the pudding, if you're gonna be all pedantic about it). Windows on Arm has been around for a while, but in many ways, it made its real entrance last year with the Snapdragon X chips. Upon these chips' launch in some Windows on Arm laptops, however, it was quickly noted that there were many apps that just didn't work at all. I was keen to hear what Arm thinks about this problem today, so I asked Bergey. He told me in no uncertain terms: "The compatibility thing, in our mind, is really something that's largely a solved problem." The word "largely", of course, might do a lot of the legwork here, as it depends on what kinds of apps we're talking about and the kinds of users we're considering. Bergey explains: "I think that there's a lot of concern about [software compatibility], but what we're actually seeing has been quite exciting. I mean, I think Microsoft put out quite a few kinds of proof points there—you know, they obviously have a lot of telemetry. You know, the average users spend about 93% of their time now, with native Arm apps, and the other ones that are not native are quite performant." After rooting around online, the closest I could find to that 93% figure was Microsoft saying one year ago that "Nearly 90% of the total app minutes that users spend in apps today have native Arm versions, providing the most efficient and performant experience. And if they need to run apps in emulation, they'll experience a significant performance boost with the new Prism emulator for app compatibility and performance." It's important to note that 90% of time spent in apps, of course, doesn't mean 90% of apps—people might spend most of their time in a minority of apps. But native Arm app coverage does seem to be quite large, now, for the general user, whether it's browser, communication, or even creative software. And Prism can at least render non-native apps usable. But of course, I was keen to move on to talk about gaming, as that's what we're most interested in, here. Regarding this, Bergey seems well aware of some of the problems with using an Arm chip for gaming. One of the primary compatibility problems with gaming and Windows on Arm comes from anti-cheats. The client VP explains: "The way [these anti-cheats are] written is they're actually looking for some registers … Well, those registers don't exist in the [Arm] architecture. They're kind of like some legacy registers that are not actually required. So that's why that kicked over the anti-cheat stuff. We had to work with Microsoft and partners on just kind of getting those things addressed … I think it's a journey, but I think for a lot of users the experience is quite good." Despite working on addressing those issues with partners, we know that gaming is still far from perfect on Arm. Just a few months ago our Ian Evenden took a deep dive into Windows on Arm for gaming and found that while performance tends to be surprisingly good in games that do work, there are still a bunch that don't. Bergey hinted at what seems to be the crux of the matter and the crux of the future for PC gaming on Arm, if there is to be such a future: "I think that generally, there's becoming more and more value for game developers to be, I guess, instruction set agnostic … As there becomes more of these kind of cross platform [integrations, eg, between Android and Chrome], it's going to become more and more important or interesting to developers say, you know, of course, we'll do an Arm build as well as our x86 build." I pressed Bergey a little on this, and he explained what this might look like moving forward: "I think what happens is that developers just say, 'I'm going to go support the arm ecosystem and the x86 ecosystem,' right? I don't think that they're going to have to do this kind of like, pick one, right? I think what you'll just see is developers say, Hey, I'm just going to go support both. Your next upgrade Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and gaming motherboard: The right graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest. "And of course, there's extra work, and of course, there's going to need to be some industry incentive and stuff to make that happen. But that's the same thing with, you know, supporting an AMD graphics card and an Nvidia graphics card, right? … But at the end of the day, it's in the game developer's best interest to support [both]." In other words, then, it looks like Arm sees the solution to Windows on Arm gaming compatibility to be in the hands of game developers choosing to make that choice to build in native Arm support. I'm unsure whether that future will pan out exactly as Arm envisions, but if the popularity of SteamOS and increasing Linux adoption is anything to go by, it seems PC gamers might be a little more willing to try something new. To the extent that Windows sitting on top of a different architecture is new, perhaps that's something that game developers will indeed keep in mind. No crystal balls here, though. We'll just have to wait and see.
CNBC
5 hours ago
- CNBC
An Israeli attack on Iran could send oil prices above $100 as tensions mount
Beset by near-universal bearish outlooks just a month ago, oil prices could spike to more than $100 a barrel in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, some analysts are warning. Crude prices spiked as much as 5% overnight — before paring gains — on fears of military escalation between Iran and Israel as President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of some U.S. personnel from embassies and bases across the Middle East. The front-month August contract for global benchmark Brent crude was trading at $69 per barrel at 3:20 p.m. ET on Thursday, while the front-month July U.S. WTI contract was at $67.7 per barrel. "They [U.S. military personnel] are being moved out because it could be a dangerous place and we will see what happens... We have given notice to move out," Trump told reporters on Wednesday. The Pentagon has ordered the withdrawal of troops and non-essential staff from embassies in Baghdad, Kuwait and Bahrain. The jury is still out as to whether the moves are a pressure play ahead of upcoming U.S.-Iran nuclear talks, or whether the U.S., Israel and Iran are truly on the verge of conflict. The geopolitical risk premium is "already at least partially reflected in current oil prices," according to J.P. Morgan's global commodities research team, citing Brent crude trading at just under $70 a barrel, already above its model-derived fair value figure of $66 for June. "This suggests an elevated 7% probability of a worst-case scenario, where the price reaction is exponential rather than linear, with the impact on supply potentially extending beyond a 2.1 mbd (million barrels per day) reduction in Iranian oil exports," the bank's research team wrote in a note published Thursday. Iran is OPEC's third-largest crude producer. Israel appears ready to attack Iran, according to reports citing U.S. and European officials, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pressing Trump to allow strikes. But the American president said in late May that he had warned Netanyahu against attacking Iran while negotiations with Washington were under way. U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff is currently set to meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Oman on Sunday for a sixth round of negotiations. Strait of Hormuz in focus Oil traders are focusing on the potential of a wider conflict shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint through which 20% of the volume of the world's total oil consumption passes daily. The British Navy on Wednesday issued a rare warning to ships in the region, saying it had "been made aware of increased tensions within the region which could lead to an escalation of military activity having a direct impact on mariners." It urged caution for vessels transiting "the Arabian Gulf, Gulf of Oman and Straits of Hormuz." Beyond that, J.P. Morgan warned, "a more general Middle East conflagration could ignite retaliatory responses from major oil producing countries in the region responsible for a third of global oil output." "Under this severe outcome," the bank's analysts wrote, "we estimate oil prices could surge to the $120-130/bbl range." Even before the latest uptick in tensions, some oil industry watchers were already making bullish calls despite a flood of announced OPEC+ supply coming onto the market, and lower global growth and demand forecasts due to trade and tariff tensions. Josh Young, founder and chief investment officer at Houston-based Bison Interests, told CNBC in late May that physical markets are more tightly supplied than previously thought, and with several oil rigs in the U.S. shale patch coming offline just as the U.S. summer driving season begins, markets should be preparing for Brent crude at $85 a barrel. "The pure inventory versus consumption would indicate $85 [per barrel], which is way higher than where we are right now. It's almost uncomfortable to say that, but that's the current price implied by inventories," Young told CNBC's Access Middle East. He cited his forecast figure as "fair value," arguing that "typically, you go from too cheap to too expensive. So I don't think we should be ruling out $100 oil this year. And I think if there is a geopolitical risk, it could get even higher." Without the geopolitical risk premium — namely, a conflict with Iran — Young still sees crude coming up to the $80 to $85 per barrel range, particularly in the event of trade deals being reached and Trump's tariffs being lowered. The outlook is boosted by this month's forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which sees a decline in U.S. oil production for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic due to slower drilling activity and a declining rig count. Such bullish forecasts are certainly not the norm, however. Without a military attack on Iran, J.P. Morgan's base case for oil "remains in the low-to-mid $60s oil for the remainder of 2025, and $60 in 2026." Goldman Sachs also maintains an oil price forecast in the $50 to $60 per barrel range for this and next year, despite noting an improving demand picture, downside risks to U.S. supply and geopolitical tensions. The recent rise in inventories due to OPEC+ output increases, "supports our cautious oil price forecast, with Brent expected to average $60 for the rest of 2025 and $56 in 2026," the bank's commodities team wrote. "However, small misses in OPEC+ supply suggest that lower-than-anticipated spare capacity represents an upside risk to our price forecast."
